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LCLS Construction Gathering Steam
By Matthew Early Wright
The LCLS project is off and running. This summer, crews
will begin several major construction projects, planners will sign
contracts for hardware, and R&D experimentation and testing of materials
will begin.
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The LCLS
design provides room for expanding the machine from the initial
six experimental stations to 30-50 stations on additional beam
lines. |
“We have a lot of stuff going on,” said LCLS
project director John Galayda. “By June, we should be well on our way.”
Construction of an annex to the Klystron Gallery, which will house the
LCLS injector, is set to begin next month. The annex will be built in
sector 20, close to where the gallery passes under Interstate 280.
LCLS collaborators at Argonne National Labs will award contracts for the
fabrication of the undulator magnets in June and July. The undulators
are long arrays of permanent magnets that wiggle the electron beam back
and forth as it travels through the vacuum pipe. “This bathes the
electron beam in its own X-radiation, producing the amplification that
causes LCLS to act as a laser,” Galayda said.
Construction is also set to begin on the Magnet Measurement Lab, where
the undulators will be tested, repaired, and calibrated. “The magnet
fields must be very precisely controlled,” Galayda explained. “We have
to take into account and compensate for the difference between the
earth’s magnetic field in the LCLS undulator hall and that of the lab
room.” Later in the summer, collaborators from
Lawrence Livermore National Labs will begin materials testing and
experiments at DESY’s Tesla test facility in Hamburg, Germany, Galayda
said. By September, LCLS will have identified a
construction manager to oversee major projects. The most visible of
these projects will be tunneling under the hill east of the Research
Yard, where the LCLS undulator hall will be built, and constructing the
experiment halls and the new Central Lab Office Complex (CLOC).
In the month of October, during a scheduled shutdown of the linac, the
first section of LCLS vacuum pipe will be installed. This will connect
the injector to the main linac for the first time, signaling the
official start of hardware assembly. “As the first actual pipe of the
LCLS, It’s kind of symbolic,” Galayda said. “And once it’s in place, we
can start installing hardware while the B-Factory is running.” |
