Dr Alan Young
Senior Research Fellow
Physics
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Publications
- Wideband amplification of transient signals for application in pulse compression
- Young Alan, Whyte Colin, Robertson Craig, MacInnes Philip, Phelps Alan, Cross Adrian, Zhang Liang, Donaldson Craig, Matheson Kathleen, Ronald Kevin
- 2021 IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) 2021 The 48th IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) (2021)
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOPS36761.2021.9588422
- Large helicon apparatus for parametric microwave coupling experiments in a magnetised plasma
- Wilson K, Selman L, Whyte C G, MacInnes P, Young A R, Phelps ADR, Cross AW, Zhang L, Eliasson B, Speirs DC, Robertson CW, Ronald K, Cairns RA, Bingham R, Bamford R, Koepke ME
- 2021 IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS) The 48th IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science (ICOPS)` (2021)
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICOPS36761.2021.9588477
- Characterisation oga helicon source for non-linear microwave coupling experiments in a magnetised plasma
- Wilson Kieran J, Selman Liam, Whyte Colin G, MacInnes Philip, Young Alan R, Phelps Alan R, Cross Adrian W, Zhang Liang, Eliasson Bengt, Speirs David C, Robertson Craig W, Ronald Kevin, Cairns Robert, Alan, Bingham Robert, Bamford Ruth, Koepke Mark E
- 63rd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, pp. TP11.00034 (2021)
- Performance of the MICE diagnostic system
- , Bogomilov M, Tsenov R, Vankova-Kirilova G, Song YP, Tang JY, Li ZH, Bertoni R, Bonesini M, Chignoli F, Mazza R, Palladino V, de Bari A, Orestano D, Tortora L, Kuno Y, Sakamoto H, Sato A, Ishimoto S, Chung M, Sung CK, Filthaut F, Fedorov M, Jokovic D, Maletic D, Savic M, Grant A, Griffiths S, Muir A, Owens P, White C, Brown C, Rogers C, Watson S, Wilson A, Cooke P, Long K, Booth CN, Smith PJ, Chatzitheodoridis GT, Dick AJ, Ronald K, Whyte CG, Young AR, Boyd S, Taylor I, Ellis M, Lambert A, Li D, Luo T, Summers DJ
- Journal of Instrumentation Vol 16 (2021)
- https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-0221/16/08/P08046
- Progress and plans for nonlinear wave-plasma interaction experiments
- Selman L, Wilson K, MacInnes P, Whyte CG, Young AR, Phelps ADR, Cross AW, Zhang L, Eliasson B, Speirs DC, Robertson CW, Ronald K, Cairns RA, Bingham R, Bamford R, Koepke ME
- 47th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (2021)
- Demonstration of cooling by the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment
- , Bogomilov M, Whyte C G, Ronald K, Young A R, Chatzitheodoridis G T, Dick A J
- Nature Vol 578, pp. 53-59 (2020)
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1958-9
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Projects
- High Powered Electro-Magnetic (HPEM) Amplifiers to generate smart waveforms for long range in-band Radio Frequency effects (FA9550-19-1-7011)
- Ronald, Kevin (Principal Investigator) Robertson, Craig (Research Co-investigator) Whyte, Colin (Research Co-investigator) Young, Alan (Research Co-investigator)
- High Powered Electro-Magnetic (HPEM) Amplifiers to generate smart waveforms for long range in-band Radio Frequency effects
- 01-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-2024
- Dispersive Pulse Compressors
- Ronald, Kevin (Principal Investigator) Phelps, Alan (Co-investigator) Young, Alan (Research Co-investigator)
- 30-Jan-2018 - 29-Jan-2019
- MICE Ionization-Cooling Demonstration
- Ronald, Kevin (Principal Investigator) Whyte, Colin (Co-investigator) Young, Alan (Research Co-investigator)
- "The Neutrino Factory is a possible future accelerator facility that creates beams of neutrinos from the decays of muons in a storage ring. The neutrino beams from a Neutrino Factory would have the highest intensity and can be controlled with unprecedented accuracy. For these reasons, the Neutrino Factory has the potential to discover measurable differences between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations, which could be the key to understanding the puzzle of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. This phenomenon, known as CP violation, has been observed in the quark sector but has never been seen in the neutrino sector. A future Neutrino Factory would determine CP violation in the neutrino sector with the best possible accuracy. Furthermore, a Neutrino factory could be used as a first stage before the construction of a Muon Collider, which could be used to measure the properties of the Higgs boson with the ultimate precision, and could potentially reach energies of up to 6 TeV, in order to explore new physics phenomena at the highest energy frontier.
Both the Neutrino Factory and a Muon Collider rely on the acceleration of muons. To be able to create muon accelerator facilities, we require to reduce the size of the muon beam so that it may be accelerated. Since muons decay within 2 microseconds in their own rest frame, the only known way to reduce the phase space of the muon beam before the muons decay is to use the concept of ionisation cooling, in which the muons lose energy in an absorber such as liquid hydrogen or lithium hydride (LiH) and then recover the longitudinal component of the momentum by accelerating them using RF cavities. The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) is an engineering demonstration of the concept of ionisation cooling. This experiment is being built at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in which a beam of muons will be cooled in a muon cooling cell consisting of three absorbers and two RF cavities inside the field of two focus coil magnets. The emittance of the beam is measured before and after the cooling channel using a scintillating fibre tracker inside a superconducting solenoid, and the muons are identified using time-of-flight detectors, a Cherenkov detector and a calorimeter system consisting of a scintillating fibre-lead pre-shower detector (named the KL) and a totally active scintillating detector, called the Electron Muon Ranger (EMR).
In this proposal we aim to perform measurements of emittance reduction, without RF cavities (MICE step IV) and perform the final demonstration of ionisation cooling with RF cavities. This proposal is a bid for 42 months funding from Oct 2016 to March 2020, supporting academic and student effort over that period and research staff from the end of the bridging support that ends in December 2016." - 01-Jan-2017 - 31-Jan-2022
- Continuation of UK participation in the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment - Bridging Funds
- Ronald, Kevin (Principal Investigator) Whyte, Colin (Co-investigator) Young, Alan (Research Co-investigator)
- "The Neutrino Factory is a possible future accelerator facility that creates beams of neutrinos from the decays of muons in a storage ring. The neutrino beams from a Neutrino Factory would have the highest intensity and can be controlled with unprecedented accuracy. For these reasons, the Neutrino Factory has the potential to discover measurable differences between neutrino and antineutrino oscillations, which could be the key to understanding the puzzle of the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe. This phenomenon, known as CP violation, has been observed in the quark sector but has never been seen in the neutrino sector. A future Neutrino Factory would determine CP violation in the neutrino sector with the best possible accuracy. Furthermore, a Neutrino factory could be used as a first stage before the construction of a Muon Collider, which could be used to measure the properties of the Higgs boson with the ultimate precision, and could potentially reach energies of up to 6 TeV, in order to explore new physics phenomena at the highest energy frontier.
Both the Neutrino Factory and a Muon Collider rely on the acceleration of muons. To be able to create muon accelerator facilities, we require to reduce the size of the muon beam so that it may be accelerated. Since muons decay within 2 microseconds in their own rest frame, the only known way to reduce the phase space of the muon beam before the muons decay is to use the concept of ionisation cooling, in which the muons lose energy in an absorber such as liquid hydrogen or lithium hydride (LiH) and then recover the longitudinal component of the momentum by accelerating them using RF cavities. The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) is an engineering demonstration of the concept of ionisation cooling. This experiment is being built at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in which a beam of muons will be cooled in a muon cooling cell consisting of three absorbers and two RF cavities inside the field of two focus coil magnets. The emittance of the beam is measured before and after the cooling channel using a scintillating fibre tracker inside a superconducting solenoid, and the muons are identified using time-of-flight detectors, a Cherenkov detector and a calorimeter system consisting of a scintillating fibre-lead pre-shower detector (named the KL) and a totally active scintillating detector, called the Electron Muon Ranger (EMR).
In this proposal we aim to perform measurements of emittance reduction, without RF cavities (MICE step IV) and perform the final demonstration of ionisation cooling with RF cavities. This proposal is a bid for 9 months funding from April to December 2016 in order to bridge the current MICE Step IV construction grant that ends in March 2016 and the final demonstration of ionisation cooling, expected to run until 2019." - 01-Jan-2016 - 31-Jan-2016
- Proposal For Continuation Of Uk Participation In The International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment: Requested Additional Proposal For Studentship
- Ronald, Kevin (Principal Investigator) Whyte, Colin (Research Co-investigator) Speirs, David (Researcher) Young, Alan (Researcher)
- 01-Jan-2013 - 31-Jan-2016
- Proposal For Continuation Of UK Participation In The International Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment
- Ronald, Kevin (Principal Investigator) Phelps, Alan (Co-investigator) Whyte, Colin (Research Co-investigator) Speirs, David (Researcher) Young, Alan (Researcher)
- "Neutrinos are three different but related particles; their ability to turn into each other has given physicists their first glimpse of the physics which they know must lay beyond the Standard Model. Investigation of the physics which underlies their properties will: deepen our understanding of how the Universe developed after the Big Bang; how the current asymmetry between matter and anti-matter developed from a situation where they were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang; and help us to understand what happens when a supernova explodes showering the cosmos with the heavy elements necessary for planets and life itself to form.
In order to understand their properties, we must build an accelerator capable of creating neutrinos in immense numbers. They must have energy between well-defined limits and the mixture of different types must be very precisely known. Such a facility, known as the Neutrino Factory, would be revolutionary and to build one is a challenging project, both from the point of view of the particle detectors which must be built, and the engineering problems which must be overcome. This programme needs a world-wide collaboration, but it is one in which physicists and engineers from the UK are playing a leading role.
Neutrinos are created from a beam of muons and the muons themselves are produced from the decay of pions produced by the collision of protons with a metal target. A machine to make an intense beam of neutrinos needs to take the beam of muons, which is large and diverges rapidly, and reduce its size and divergence. The resulting beam can be accelerated, stored and when it decays produces an intense beam of neutrinos. The muons only live for 2.2 microseconds when at rest, and even when they are accelerated and their lifetime is extended by the effect of relativity, there is little time to manipulate the muons so that they are in a state to be accelerated.
MICE is an international collaboration based at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, which uses a beam of muons created by the ISIS accelerator and aims to show that it is feasible to create such an intense beam. It will do this by creating a beam of muons of much lower intensity and tracking each one individually through one part of the system which has been designed to perform this beam compression at the Neutrino Factory. This process where the random sideways motions of the muons are reduced and we are left with the longitudinal motion is referred to as cooling the beam; the system which performs the cooling is known as the cooling channel.
The first stage was to build a system capable of producing a muon beam whose size and divergence could be adjusted before it enters the cooling channel. This was completed last year and measurements have been made to show that the beam has the flexibility and intensity for MICE to perform the required measurements.
The second stage is to finish construction of the cooling channel itself and to provide a system to measure very accurately the position and momentum of each muon before and after it has passed through the cooling channel. By looking at many muons produced in many different conditions, it will be possible to determine how much cooling has been produced by the channel. In the channel itself the muons will be slowed by passing through a suitable material, such as liquid hydrogen, liquid helium or lithium hydride. As they slow they lose momentum both longitudinally and transversely to the beam axis. Then they are accelerated with high field radio frequency cavities, replacing only the longitudinal momentum.
This experiment which is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with materials, magnets and cooling technologies, represents a collaboration between particle physicists, and accelerator physicists and will demonstrate the UK's ability to host an experiment at the forefront of science and engineering." - 01-Jan-2012 - 31-Jan-2016