HOT OFF THE PRESS

At its most recent meeting (15.03.04) the CCLRC Programme Board approved an increased total resource allocation of £13.922M for the project. A further £0.8M is to be held in reserve as contingency. The project will run over four years, the deadline for the construction of the ERL Prototype remains at March 2006. The additional time will be used for exploitation of the prototype.

NEW PROJECT SPONSOR

Colin Whitehouse the new Daresbury Laboratory director will take over from Hywel Price as the project sponsor and chair of the ERLP Project Board.

LINAC ORDER

Mike Poole signed the largest order in his life last week when approving the superconducting accelerator units for the ERL Prototype. The order (which had to be countersigned by John Wood) was for 2.16M euros plus VAT.

GUN UPDATE

There has been considerable progress behind the scenes on the ERLP gun. The longest lead-time order is the ceramic which has now been ordered. The gun is on schedule for commissioning in September/October of this year.

www.4gls.ac.uk

4GLS OPEN FORUM MEETING

The next 4GLS Open Forum meeting will take place at 10.30am on Thursday the 18 th March in the Tower Seminar Room. Charles Monroe of Monroe Brothers will give a talk entitled, “Cryogenics for the ERL Prototype”.

If time permits this will be followed by a brief, visit summary by Jim Clarke. Jim recently travelled to LURE on a CLIO FEL fact-finding mission.

 

THE 4GLS INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING

The fifth 4GLS IAC meeting will take place in the Tower Seminar Room on the 25 th and 26 th March. The meeting runs from 2.00pm on the 25 th to around 4.00pm on the 26 th. Staff may sit in on parts of the IAC meeting if they wish to but they must participate only as observers.

Please note that attendance at the 4GLS Open Forum and observing the 4GLS IAC meetings should be viewed as part of your learning and development and the time should be booked to your home departments not the 4GLS project. Please ensure line managers approve.

 

PHOTOINJECTOR LASER

The photoinjector laser was unpacked at RAL by Graeme Hirst, Marta Divall and Gary Markey on the 25 th of March. The laser worked well and comfortably met the specification straight from the box. The next step is to integrate the laser with a chopper and Pockels cell (amongst other bits) which are used to modify the laser output pulse structure so that it can deliver single pulses or 100 microsec pulse trains at 20 Hz. This task will take until August then the system will be transported to DL and re-commissioned in September.

Gary Markey, Marta Divall and Graeme Hirst with the new photoinjector laser at RAL

 

"Gary Markey, Marta Divall and Graeme Hirst with the new photoinjector laser at RAL. The laser controllers, in the centre of the picture, dwarf the laser itself, which is the blue and silver box on the right hand side."