A researcher at Michigan State University has received a prestigious Accelerator Stewardship Award from the Office of High Energy Physics at the U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, to advance use-inspired basic research in accelerator science and technology.
Sergey Baryshev, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will use a $225,000 grant to design and establish a high power X-band nanosecond pulse microscopy system to provide insight into fundamental origins of vacuum breakdown.
“We’ll be working to develop a deeper understanding of the physical origins of the vacuum breakdown/arc by testing a specific, hot cathodic, scenario of its formation,” he said. “This work is to address the core challenges for future collider, high brightness X-ray source and electron and proton therapy system technologies.”
Baryshev explained that vacuum breakdown is slowing research progress in this field.
“To be energy and cost-effective, these systems must operate in X-band and be able to comprehend multi-megawatt input power, electric gradient greater than 100 MV/m. Electrical breakdowns happen at the micro-scale, but they arrest operations in multi-meter to multi-kilometer facilities. That’s why vacuum arc is studied with a special focus by international collaborations for many decades in the effort to increase accelerating gradient and minimize accelerator downtime.”
MSU will collaborate with accelerator scientists and engineers at Stanford University’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, and Argonne Wakefield Accelerator group of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
Baryshev joined MSU in August 2017, coming from an accelerator research and development company, where his research examined diamond-based electron sources for linear accelerators and novel time-resolved microscopy concepts.
He received a master’s degree in applied physics and materials science from the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University in Russia and a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics from Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in St. Petersburg.