The John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science

The past decade has seen a renaissance in accelerator R&D in the UK, building upon the existing expertise at the Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury Laboratories and fuelled by the need to prepare for the generation of particle physics facilities after the LHC. Both the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway University of London have made very significant contributions to this renewed programme. In 2004, the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science was created, jointly hosted by the Departments of Physics of the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway University of London, with support from PPARC and CCLRC, now merged into STFC. The initial programme was focussed on R&D for the Linear Collider and the Neutrino Factory, but has broadened considerably since its inception to include developments of advanced and novel light sources, work on the upgrades for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the ISIS spallation neutron source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and of the new Diamond Light Source on the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, and the development of novel accelerators for a variety of applications from medicine (for example, using protons and light ions to treat cancer therapy) to energy (where accelerator-driven sub-critical reactors could contribute to proliferation-safe generation of nuclear energy and help reduce the volume of highly active radioactive waste). A key part of the strategy is the training of a new generation of accelerator scientists able to design, build and operate the new facilities that would be required in the future and we have made excellent progress on this, with more than 20 graduate students and 15 PDRAs being trained by the JAI alone. We propose to continue this programme, as part of a broadly-based collaboration between the universities, the accelerator science institutes (John Adams Institute, the Cockcroft Institute and the STFC Accelerator Science and Technology Centre), and the national laboratories. A key objective is to encourage the development of a domestic industry able to support this work.