The European Physical Society Accelerator Group (EPS-AG)/The Fifth International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC’14) Accelerator Prizes
The EPS-AG and the 5th International Particle Accelerator Conference (IPAC’14) are pleased to announce the winners of the EPS-AG/IPAC’14 Accelerator Prizes.
These prizes are awarded once every three years when IPAC is held in Europe to those who made a significant achievement and/or an original contribution to the accelerator field.
The Prizes Selection Committee, under the Chairmanship of Caterina Biscari (CELLS/ALBA, Barcelona), met in January 2014 and selected the winners of each prize. They will decide the winner of Prize d) during IPAC’14 in .
The Rolf Wideröe Prize for “outstanding work in the accelerator field without age limit” is awarded to Professor Mikael Eriksson, Accelerator Director of the Max-IV Laboratory, Lund, Sweden.
Professor Eriksson understands accelerator physics from the ground up. For more than four decades he has been the driving force behind the design, construction, commissioning and performance of all MAX-lab synchrotron radiation sources, from MAX I to MAX IV. With outstanding skill he has introduced simple but innovative designs and provided the technological solutions leading to their final implementation, with cutting edge performance. His special approach has brought improvement and added-value solutions, frequently challenging conventional wisdom, proposing industrial linacs as injector drivers for an FEL, or cheaper RF systems taken from mass production for other accelerators.
This enables the MAX-lab accelerators to provide users with “state-of-the-art” performance while optimizing value-for-cost. The innovations introduced by Professor Eriksson have had a substantial impact in the field of synchrotron radiation sources worldwide. The MAX IV 3 GeV storage ring design and technological implementation is paving the way for a new generation of extreme low-emittance “ultimate storage rings” for the achievement of diffraction-limited radiation sources. Many synchrotron radiation facilities worldwide are being built or upgraded using this scheme.
In addition Professor Eriksson has served on several Machine and Scientific Advisory committees around the world. His participation has always been much appreciated and our community has profited deeply from his experience. Professor Eriksson has also devoted an important part of his time to teaching accelerator physics to students at Lund University. Many of them today play a major role in different accelerators around the world, demonstrating Professor Eriksson’s outstanding impact on the dissemination of Accelerator Science.
The Gersch Budker Prize, for “a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field, with no age limit,” is awarded to Professor Tsumoru Shintake, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Okinawa, Japan.
Professor Shintake has led the construction of the SACLA X-Ray FEL based on novel C-Band technology in the RIKEN SPring-8 Center. The 400 m long SACLA linear accelerator, with accelerating gradients of 35 MV/m, provides 8 GeV beams with extreme energy stability better than 0.014%. Professor Shintake contributed to all aspects of the project including the electron source, the C-Band linac and the undulator alignment. His visionary choice of a thermionic gun, with CeB6 single crystal as cathode material, has proven to be successful in terms of emittance and stability. The first lasing of the FEL in June 2011 was the crowning achievement of numerous technological developments, and was also made possible by the successful industrialization of the C-band technology, developed from scratch. The C-band high gradient accelerator is now running stably to drive beams of low emittance electrons created by a thermionic electron source, making it possible to generate stable X-ray radiation. SACLA's novel light is expected to resolve questions in science, technology and industry, by helping to understand structure and function at the atomic level. Last but not least, Professor Shintake’s numerous highly innovative ideas strongly influenced the progress and development of many areas of accelerator physics and technology over the past decades, including a beam size monitor for nanometer sized beams now called the “Shintake Monitor”.
The Frank Sacherer Prize, for “an individual in the early part of his or her career, having made a recent significant, original contribution to the accelerator field,” is awarded to Dr Agostino Marinelli, SLAC, USA.
Among many significant contributions in a relatively short career to date, Dr Marinelli is particularly well known for his innovative work on developments of techniques that significantly improve parameters of free electron lasers such as their spectrum and longitudinal coherence. Dr Marinelli’s talents as both a theorist and an experimentalist have been demonstrated in the analysis and verification of the gain modulated FEL, a novel concept to generate two or more colors from one electron bunch – a technique that enables a new class of FEL experiments. Dr Marinelli has contributed to many other developments that are valued by the community, in particular the use of single-shot optical transition radiation diagnostics for the reconstruction of the transverse spatial structure of beam micro-bunching, the development of a kinetic model that led to the discovery of the existence of an emittance-induced anisotropy in the propagation of longitudinal plasma waves in a beam, and other techniques that have had a tremendous impact on the design of fourth-generation linac-driven coherent light sources. In a short time, Dr Marinelli has risen to prominence as one of the most ingenious accelerator scientists at SLAC, with a highly promising research career in front of him.
