Commissioning EMMA, the first nonscaling FFAG, at the Daresbury Laboratory

EMMA is a nsFFAG prototype (the world's first) which is being built at Daresbury. We anticipate the start of commissioning in about 12 months time. Beyond that there is a long programme of running the accelerator and understanding its behaviour. We have a very full set of diagnostic detectors (such as Beam Position Monitors) in the ring itself and in the extraction line, and so we can vary the operational parameters (such as magnet currents) and obtain a great deal of information about the behaviour of the electron bunches. This will lead to a full understanding of the behaviour of this new type of machine, which will act as vital input to the design of the future machines which we hope and expect will find widespread applications in medicine, condensed matter and particle physics. Part of this understanding will be gained through the running of simulations. We now have two codes for FFAG simulation (which is vital as we can then check them against each other). There are many simulation studies which will need to be done, tying in the simulation results with the data from the diagnostics. This project, and the associated programme, is establishing Daresbury and the UK as world leaders in FFAG development.