"What's going on at the Cockcroft Institute?"

Abstract:  The Cockcroft Institute (CI) is a partnership between the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and Strathclyde, and the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The core membership comprises the accelerator physics & engineering groups of the partner universities and the Accelerator Science & Technology Centre (ASTeC) of STFC at Daresbury Laboratory. The CI is the de facto national centre for accelerator R&D in the UK, and with its very strong university supported backbone closely coupled to ASTeC, comprising nearly 250 faculty, professional accelerator staff, post-doctoral research associates, admin staff and PhD students, it is probably one of the largest of its kind in the world, delivering world class R&D in RF based systems and novel methods of acceleration with major contributions to the realization of national and international accelerator facilities. The CI's cross-cutting applications programme allows this expertise to be used to address global challenges in health, security, energy, manufacturing and the environment, and to train the next generation of accelerator experts in areas where there is a recognized international skills shortage. We are also inspiring school students and the public through our extensive public engagement programmes.

The aims and objectives of the Cockcroft Institute of accelerator science and technology will be outlined. This will provide the audience with an understanding of how we see ourselves contributing to global activities in the development and application of particle accelerators, colliders and intense light sources, as well as training some of the next generation of accelerator scientists and engineers. An assortment of research highlights from our current programme will also be presented. This includes work on conventional RF based machines as well as novel acceleration techniques involving laser-plasma interactions and THz-dielectric structures.