Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation(PASI)

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Proton accelerators have served for more than 60 years at the forefront of scientific investigation across an immense range of disciplines. The world-leading ISIS neutron-spallation source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) serves an international community of more than 1000 scientists in studies that include investigations of condensed matter, the properties of materials, the investigation of biological systems, and the investigation of the electron structure of atoms. At the energy frontier, machines such as the LHC at CERN have long been used to push back the boundaries of nuclear and particle physics. Proton accelerators have also been harnessed to serve industry and medicine, for example through the production of radioisotopes and the treatment of cancer. The next generation of proton accelerator facilities has the potential to: revolutionize scientific enquiry through the provision of beams of very high power across a broad range of energy; to make particle-beam therapy widely available through the development of compact accelerators; and to contribute substantially to the provision of low-carbon energy through accelerator-driven sub-critical nuclear reactors. In addition, new techniques allow facilities capable of delivering intense, high-energy beams of muons and neutrinos to be conceived. Such facilities have the potential to revolutionize the study of particle physics at the Neutrino Factory and the Muon Collider and have been proposed to serve the security agenda as the basis of cargo-scanning systems. To realize this potential requires that an energetic and farsighted R&D programme be established. STFC and Fermilab management have noted that the interests of their communities in support of the Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation (PASI)programme are very closely aligned and have therefore agreed to work to establish a mutually beneficial strategic partnership in which each side is able to leverage both intellectual and other resources. As a first step, we propose to establish a joint post-doc, or fellowship, programme.This project aims to contribute significantly to the MICE experiment, which looks for the first demonstration of the ionization cooling of muons, which is essential in the development of future accelerator facilities needed for the elementary particle physics research. It also wishes to contribute in developing the nuSTORM project, potentially the first future neutrino oscillation experiment using stored muons.