Marja GrechA University of Malta researcher, Marja Grech, has proposed a novel way of increasing the efficiency of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Grech was working in a University research project on metamaterials in particle accelerators in collaboration with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), supervised by Dr Nicholas Sammut and Dr Alessandro Danis.
CERN runs the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, situated beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It consists of a 27-kilometre underground ring of superconducting electromagnets in which two high-energy particle beams are made to accelerate close to the speed of light.
When a particle beam travels through accelerators like the LHC, energy is lost to the structure itself. This is ideally reduced to improve beam quality and energy efficiency.
The research team proposed the use of ‘metamaterials’ – materials engineered to have properties not found in nature – made from assemblies of multiple elements of conductors arranged in repeating patterns to create negative values of magnetic permeability.
The research consisted of drawing up a theoretical framework for the metamaterials, simulating their effect on moving particles and then verifying the results experimentally in the CERN labs.
“After many months of hard work, we noted a significant reduction in the beam coupling impedance of a beam pipe,” said Grech, adding that the results of the project may lead to applications in biomedical research, industry and education. Dr Sammut commented that the results were “very encouraging”.
Grech recently defended her masters by research with distinction at the University’s Department of Microelectronics and Nanoelectronics at the Faculty of ICT.
The research was partially funded by the Master It scholarship part-financed by the EU European Social Fund. The instruments and equipment used for the experimental stage of Grech’s dissertation and the software used for simulation during the research were provided by CERN.