High-Voltage Gun Accelerates Electrons from Zero to 80 … Percent the Speed of Light
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed and tested the world’s highest voltage polarized electron gun, a key piece of technology needed for building the world’s first fully polarized Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). The EIC, a state-of-the-art nuclear physics facility being built at Brookhaven in partnership with DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), will accelerate and collide polarized electrons with polarized protons and ions — atoms stripped of their electrons — so scientists can investigate the innermost building blocks of visible matter.
“This gun not only exceeds the EIC requirements, but we also get world-leading results,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Erdong Wang, the chief architect and implementor of the device.
Wang proposed the electron gun as a research and development project back in 2017 and has been spearheading its design, engineering, assembly, and testing ever since. Much of the work and all the testing were done at Stony Brook University (SBU), a partner in Brookhaven Science Associates, the entity that manages Brookhaven Lab on behalf of DOE. The project drew on the expertise of scientific and technical staff and graduate students there and at several EIC collaborating institutions, including Jefferson Lab, Old Dominion University, and others.
EIC Science Director Abhay Deshpande, a professor of physics at SBU who is also serving as Brookhaven Lab’s interim associate laboratory director for Nuclear and Particle Physics, said, “This project is a great example of the strong collaboration between Brookhaven Lab and Stony Brook, particularly for research in nuclear physics and the development of technologies needed for the EIC.”