Project acronym:
DIRAC-PHASE-1
Construction stage 1 of the International Accelerator Facility,
Darmstadt Ion Research and Antiproton Center (DIRAC)
Proposal/Contract no.: 515876-CN
Construction of new infrastructure
1.
Project Summary
A Design Study will be undertaken aimed at completing all technical preparatory work necessary for the
construction of the European Virtual Observatory (Euro-VO). Euro-VO is a specifically European
implementation of the Virtual Observatory (VObs) concept, and will produce a world leading infrastructure
providing a unified virtual data resource and the ability to perform complex data discovery and manipulation
tasks across the whole range of astronomy. Access to data and tools will be equally good across Europe,
regardless of location. This will require establishing an alliance of data centres, and a VObs facility centre in
support of the community, but crucially requires the construction of an infrastructural glue of software
components, in the context of rapidly evolving background developments in IT and the grid. The VO-TECH
project aims specifically at feasibility studies and design work aimed at integrating such new technologies into
the Euro-VO. Key IT advances to build on are in intelligent resource discovery (ontology and the semantic web),
data mining, and visualisation capabilities. These will be integrated via global astronomical interoperability
standards coupled with the latest distributed grid computing services. Additionally this project covers design and
preparatory work to ensure that data from the major European telescopes and facilities (as represented by the
Opticon and RadioNet networks) is fully accessible through the Euro-VO.
The present proposal has as its objective a major advance in facility performance and research capability at the
UNILAC/SIS18 accelerator system at the GSI Laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany. The pro-posed construction
project aims, in one step, at two goals: i) substantial increases in primary ion beam intensity at the present
facility, with factors of five (at high charge state), respectively fifty (at low charge state), and correspondingly
increased secondary intensities for beams of pions and ‘radioactive beams’, and ii) optimisation of the current
facility as injector for the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) as planned by the European science
community. The intensity increase will arise from two upgrades of the space-charge limited heavy-ion
synchrotron SIS18: an increase in cycling frequency and a reduction of space charge by injection at lower charge
state. The intensity increase will provide radioactive beam experiments through in-flight fragmentation to
approach the next-generation intensity levels. The new capabilities can be fully utilized because we propose
here, at moderate cost and effort, to adapt the experimental infrastructure with the R3B-Magnet and the upgrade
of the HADES-Spectrometer to the higher secondary beam intensities. The concept for the future facility was
developed in workshops and discussions involving the international science community. It will provide for a
highly parallel operation between several research pro-grams and is documented in a Conceptual Design Report
(CDR). The concept was subsequently evaluated by the Wissenschaftsrat of the German Federal Government
and other science groups (including NuPECC). In 2003 the German Federal Government announced approval of
the project, with Germany providing up to 75% of the needed funding (65% federal, 10% State of Hessen). At
least 25% of the construction costs have to come from international partners. In September 2004 a Memorandum
of Understanding to participate in the construction and operation of FAIR was signed by 10 countries. The SIS18
upgrade as injector for the new facility is part of the first phase of a three-phase staged construction scenario.
2.
Project website address: www.gsi.de/fair/FAIR-CNI
3.
List of participants
Participant
number
(co-ordinator = N°1)
Participant name
(Organisation, city, country)
Short name
1
Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforshung mbH, Darmstadt,
Germany
GSI
2
Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany
FZI
3
The Svedberg Laboratory, Uppsala, Sweden
UU
4
The Central Laboratory of the Research Councils,
Daresbury, England
CCLRC
5
void
void
6
Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Novosibirsk, Russia
BINP
7
Institute of High Current Electronics, Tomsk, Russia
IHCE SB RAS
8
Institute für Kernphysik, Universität Frankfurt, Frankfurt,
Germany
U-Frankfurt
9
M. Smoluchowski Institute of Physics Jagiellonian
University, Krakow, Poland
JU
10
Departamento de Física de Partículas University of
Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
USC
11
Laboratório de Instrumentação e Física Experimental de
Partículas, Coimbra, Portugal
LIP-Coimbra
12
Nuclear Physics Institute, Academy of Science of Czech
Republic
NPI
13
Institute for Nuclear Research, Russian Academy of
Science, Moscow, Russia
INR
14
Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, Gif sur Yvette, France
CEA