ALICE

ALICE (Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments) is a prototype accelerator which has been designed and built at Daresbury Laboratory. It was formerly known as ERLP (Energy Recovery Linac Prototype).

The heart of this new facility at Daresbury Laboratory, is an Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) accelerator and a hugely powerful
multi-terawatt laser.

The ERL is the first of a new type of accelerator to be built in Europe. Extremely high quality bunches of electrons are produced by intense light pulses from a green laser bombarding a semiconductor surface. This electron beam is then accelerated to 35 million Volts through superconducting radiofrequency cavities. These bunches travelling at near light-speed are then compressed, to stimulate the production of intense, short pulses of light.

This unique facility will be used to investigate and overcome the challenges presented to scientists in designing and building future generations of accelerators like the UK’s proposed new light source.
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The intense light produced from ALICE can be used to probe in minute detail, the inner workings of physical processes at the atomic level. Such studies can assist in solving some of the major challenges of the modern world - for instance, developing more effective drugs or designing more efficient solar cells.
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