SBU Helping BNL Develop World’s Highest-Voltage Electron Gun

Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist Erdong Wang in a basement lab at Stony Brook University with the high-voltage polarized electron gun that will put the "e" - or electrons - in the future Electron-Ion Collider. (Roger Stoutenburgh/Brookhaven National Laboratory)

The high-intensity polarized photocathode gun is a crucial component for the future Electron-Ion Collider

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed and tested the world's highest voltage polarized electron gun, a key piece of technology needed for building the world's first fully polarized Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).

The EIC, a state-of-the-art nuclear physics facility being built at Brookhaven in partnership with DOE's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), will accelerate and collide polarized electrons with polarized protons and ions - atoms stripped of their electrons - so scientists can investigate the innermost building blocks of visible matter.

Much of the work and all of the testing were done at Stony Brook University, a partner in Brookhaven Science Associates, the entity that manages Brookhaven Lab on behalf of DOE. The project drew on the expertise of scientific and technical staff and graduate students there and at several EIC collaborating institutions, including Jefferson Lab, Old Dominion University, and others.

Brookhaven Lab physicist Erdong Wang, the chief architect and implementor of the device, proposed the electron gun as a research and development project in 2017 and has been spearheading its design, engineering, assembly, and testing ever since. "Our team includes experts in beam dynamics, high voltage, materials science, lasers, engineering, and beam diagnostics," Wang said.

"This project is a great example of the strong collaboration between Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook, particularly for research in nuclear physics and the development of technologies needed for the EIC," EIC science director Abhay Deshpande, distinguished professor in Stony Brook's Department of Physics and Astronomy who is also Brookhaven Lab's interim associate laboratory director for Nuclear and Particle Physics.

Wang and a team of colleagues from Brookhaven's Collider-Accelerator Department, the EIC Directorate, SBU, and other collaborating institutions developed the unique photocathode structure and innovative approaches to achieve a superior performance.

"SBU students were involved in the foundational research from the beginning of the project," Wang said. "We learned a lot based on the last several decades of effort, but we pushed the development of novel concepts to produce a truly unique gun."

The direct-current, laser-driven polarized electron gun will serve as a starting gun of sorts for one of the EIC's streams of colliding particles, producing and firing off the electrons that make their way into and around the 2.4-mile-circumference circular collider.

"We put the 'e' in the EIC," said John Skaritka, the Brookhaven Lab mechanical engineer who led the mechanical design and planning for the project.

The powerful gun speeds up the velocity of electrons to 80% the speed of light, an acceleration of zero to more than 500 million miles per hour - over the span of just two inches inside the gun - in about two ten-billionths of a second.

Read the complete story at the BNL website.

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