Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Carlton
That sounds pretty interesting, Mike. What's the limit you can accelerate the electrons to? 90% of c sounds amazing! What do you do with the neutrons you generate? Smash them?
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Since we're accelerating H- ions (basically a hydrogen atom with an extra electron added) we're sort of limited to 1.3 GeV of energy due to a phenomena known as Lorentz stripping (the electrons come off by themselves before we strip them). So, 90% is about the limit.
We are currently the world record holder for a pulsed neutron source though. In fact, we broke our own record just this week and are currently operating at 1.7 MW of beam power (60 pulses of protons per second with about 1x10^15 protons per pulse at ~1.1 GeV).
We produce neutrons for condensed matter physics and fundamental neutron physics experiments. I actually work on the mercury target side of the house, so take whatever I said above about the accelerator with a grain of salt.
The target module (taken through 1 m of lead glass as it is reading about 50,000 rads/hr):
If you google "sns mercury target", a lot of the photos are mine.
