CBB Graduate Student Ryan Porter won one of the two second place prizes at the SRF ‘2021 conference. Awards at the SRF conference are quite important, as this is the main conference for the whole field of SRF. Winning a prize shows that the team is doing important research here at the university and throughout the Center for Bright Beams. After a quick glance, there were 46 posters included in the student poster session. Only posters and presenters in the student poster session were eligible for the award.

Below, Ryan explains his research: 

"We developed an exciting new tool for examining SRF cavity performance: high-speed temperature mapping. Temperature mapping is using many thermometers (our system of 649 thermometers) on the outside of an SRF cavity to look for localized heating while the cavity is operating (hot spots can tell you where to look for problems, and even tell you about what the problem is). Temperature mapping is not new - it was developed at Cornell in the late 80's and over the 90's and has spread to other labs. The old/other systems take minutes to read out the temperature so they sort of take long exposure pictures. However, a lot of things happen very quickly: charging the cavity takes seconds, a cavity 'quench' takes less than 1 ms, and there could be other dynamics that can teach you about the SRF cavity. Our new system is very fast and can take an entire temperature map in 0.00002 s, or video at 50,000 frames per second. This lets us record/measure dynamic things no one currently can, including cavity quench.

The poster is about using this new system on niobium-3 tin (Nb3Sn). Nb3Sn achieves some great performance, but the maximum accelerating gradient is far below their theoretical limit. The best cavity ever reached 24 MV/m (at Fermilab, we are at ~18 MV/m, best) while we expect we could reach 100 MV/m. The best niobium cavities reach ~50 MV/m, their theoretical limit. We are curious what could be causing the premature cavity quench so we used the new temperature map.”

Congratulations Ryan!