The PEPR Suprafusion (Priority Equipment Programme for Exploratory Research), proposed by CEA and CNRS, is the winner of the third wave of calls for projects under the France 2030 plan. The €50 million funding will enable the development of high-temperature superconductors to meet tomorrow's energy and societal challenges, particularly with applications in the field of fusion. The programme is based on 3 axes: the development of the technological building blocks of HTS (high-temperature superconductors), the large-scale demonstration of technological feasibility and the exploration of breakthrough applications.
The MADMAX project, which was launched in November 2016, is led by the Max Planck Institut für Physik in collaboration with several European institutes. The goal of the project is the discovery of axions with a mass of about 100 µeV, potential candidates for dark matter. To detect these axions, it is necessary to develop a specific detector consisting of an electromagnetic signal amplifier and a magnet proportional to the size of the amplifier and delivering a strong magnetic field. In order to validate the innovations in the fabrication of the magnet conductor, its cooling concept and the quench detection, a demonstrator has been designed, fabricated, integrated and tested between March 2020 and August 2021. It is named MACQU for MADMAX Coil for Quench Understanding. The entire design, from the conductor to the support structure, including the MACQU magnet, its thermal shield and the busbars, was carried out at the CEA. The demonstrator, manufactured by the industrial Bilfinger Noell GmbH, arrived in March 2021 and was successfully tested between May 18 and August 27, 2021. The analysis of the data now completed provides the desired answers and opens up unexpected new avenues of work. The feasibility of the cable concept, its cooling as well as the quench detection for the MADMAX magnet was demonstrated during these tests.
Low-temperature superconducting materials are widely used in high-field magnets, but their behaviour is closely related to the strains they undergo. Consequently, studies on the impact of stress on mechanical structures are essential. The SUPRAMITEX project is participating in this research effort by using the AMITEX-FFTP parallel code developed as part of the SIMU/MATIX project to carry out non-linear mechanical simulations on heterogeneous microstructures. This work has shown the interest of the AMITEX code to simulate the mechanical behaviour of these components, at different scales, for elastic and elasto-plastic behaviours at simulation scales that were previously unattainable.
Large ground-based telescopes with mirrors over 8 m in diameter1 use azimuthal mounts to point the stars. When tracking a star, the Earth's rotation causes the observed field on the astrophysics detector to rotate, creating "spun" images. To correct this effect, the instruments mounted on these telescopes use a "field derotator", a mechanism whose main function is to rotate a set of mirrors at very low speed and with very high precision. For the METIS instrument, CEA-Irfu has developed one of the world's very first2 derotators operating at -210°C. Entirely designed, developed and tested by the Irfu Systems Engineering Department, the METIS derotator drive achieves performance beyond the expected specifications. Currently in the testing phase, its qualification will be completed by the end of 2023 at ESO in Garching, Germany.
While the use of field derotation mechanisms is relatively common in ground-based astrophysics instruments, most scientific communities choose to place this mechanism upstream of the cryogenic instrument, so that it operates at ambient temperature. Doing this way, the required levels of accuracy (of the order of a few thousandths of a degree) are achieved using 'standard' components such as motorised stages, optical encoders, ball bearings and lubricated gearboxes.
To reduce the instrumental background noise, the METIS instrument of the future ELT will be entirely cooled down to temperatures around -210°C, so the field derotation mechanism will also have to operate at these temperatures in vacuum.
The commissioning of the 11.7 T Iseult MRI in 2021 crowned almost 20 years of AOC research and development. In an article published in the journal Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine, Nicolas Boulant and Lionel Quettier, Iseult project leaders for the CEA's Joliot and Irfu Institutes, review the details of this commissioning.
Low-temperature superconducting materials are widely used in high-field magnets, but their behaviour is closely related to the strains they undergo. Consequently, studies on the impact of stress on mechanical structures are essential. The SUPRAMITEX project is participating in this research effort by using the AMITEX-FFTP parallel code developed as part of the SIMU/MATIX project to carry out non-linear mechanical simulations on heterogeneous microstructures. This work has shown the interest of the AMITEX code to simulate the mechanical behaviour of these components, at different scales, for elastic and elasto-plastic behaviours at simulation scales that were previously unattainable.
The MADMAX project, which was launched in November 2016, is led by the Max Planck Institut für Physik in collaboration with several European institutes. The goal of the project is the discovery of axions with a mass of about 100 µeV, potential candidates for dark matter. To detect these axions, it is necessary to develop a specific detector consisting of an electromagnetic signal amplifier and a magnet proportional to the size of the amplifier and delivering a strong magnetic field. In order to validate the innovations in the fabrication of the magnet conductor, its cooling concept and the quench detection, a demonstrator has been designed, fabricated, integrated and tested between March 2020 and August 2021. It is named MACQU for MADMAX Coil for Quench Understanding. The entire design, from the conductor to the support structure, including the MACQU magnet, its thermal shield and the busbars, was carried out at the CEA. The demonstrator, manufactured by the industrial Bilfinger Noell GmbH, arrived in March 2021 and was successfully tested between May 18 and August 27, 2021. The analysis of the data now completed provides the desired answers and opens up unexpected new avenues of work. The feasibility of the cable concept, its cooling as well as the quench detection for the MADMAX magnet was demonstrated during these tests.
Thanks to the expertise developed by the CEA during the SPIRAL2 and IFMIF projects, in 2014 the CEA signed a contract with the Soreq Nuclear Research Centre (SNRC, Israel) to build a superconducting linear accelerator called SARAF (Soreq Applied Research Accelerator Facility). The aim is to build an accelerator capable of delivering proton and deuteron beams with energies ranging from 5 to 40 MeV and intensities of up to 5 mA. This equipment will be an important tool for fundamental research, particularly in nuclear physics, the characterisation of materials using neutrons and the production of medical radioisotopes. The CEA is responsible for the design, manufacturing and qualification of 5 sub-assemblies: the MEBT and the 4 cryomodules of the linear accelerator. In 2023, the CEA qualified the MEBT, which was delivered in 2020, and delivered the first cryomodule to Soreq.
The MADMAX project, which was launched in November 2016, is led by the Max Planck Institut für Physik in collaboration with several European institutes. The goal of the project is the discovery of axions with a mass of about 100 µeV, potential candidates for dark matter. To detect these axions, it is necessary to develop a specific detector consisting of an electromagnetic signal amplifier and a magnet proportional to the size of the amplifier and delivering a strong magnetic field. In order to validate the innovations in the fabrication of the magnet conductor, its cooling concept and the quench detection, a demonstrator has been designed, fabricated, integrated and tested between March 2020 and August 2021. It is named MACQU for MADMAX Coil for Quench Understanding. The entire design, from the conductor to the support structure, including the MACQU magnet, its thermal shield and the busbars, was carried out at the CEA. The demonstrator, manufactured by the industrial Bilfinger Noell GmbH, arrived in March 2021 and was successfully tested between May 18 and August 27, 2021. The analysis of the data now completed provides the desired answers and opens up unexpected new avenues of work. The feasibility of the cable concept, its cooling as well as the quench detection for the MADMAX magnet was demonstrated during these tests.
The commissioning of the 11.7 T Iseult MRI in 2021 crowned almost 20 years of AOC research and development. In an article published in the journal Magnetic Resonance Materials in Physics, Biology and Medicine, Nicolas Boulant and Lionel Quettier, Iseult project leaders for the CEA's Joliot and Irfu Institutes, review the details of this commissioning.
To reveal the influence of the dark components of the Universe, over the next six years Euclid will be observing the shapes, distances and movements of billions of galaxies. This mapping will cover periods going back to the last 10 billion years of cosmic history, in order to gain a better understanding of where, when and how dark energy and matter - two key components of the universe that are still a mystery - act.
As a prelude to the mission, it was decided to illustrate the satellite's scientific and instrumental capabilities through a series of images of the nearby Universe. Jean-Charles Cuillandre, an astronomer in CEA/IRFU's astrophysics department, led this 'ERO' (Early Release Observations) campaign over several months, with a group of scientists from the Euclid collaboration and ESA, from the choice of the five astrophysical sources to image processing, from raw data to analysed images, combining the responses of the VIS (visible light) and NISP (near infrared) instruments.
The Euclid satellite, launched from Cape Canaveral on July 1st, is traveling to reach its orbit at the second Lagrange point, which it should reach in early August. This transit time has been used to commission Euclid, checking the satellite's services such as communications, power, and pointing, and then the two instruments, VIS and NISP, as well as fine-tuning the telescope's focus. The instrument teams have just released the first "raw" images (untreated) to mark the success of instrument commissioning.
Marc Sauvage (astrophysicist at DAp/Irfu and one of the two French representatives on the Euclid consortium council): "These images perfectly match what we had simulated, but in a simulation, we know that everything we see was deliberately placed there, so in a way, it's not surprising. Here, everything we see is real, and nothing we see was known at this level of detail; it makes us want to look into every corner, to enlarge everything to see as much detail as possible. And since there is a tremendous amount of detail in just these two images, it becomes dizzying!"
Michel Berthé (Euclid project leader at DAp/Irfu): "I am truly amazed by the beauty of these images and the amount of information that can be found in them. We are only at the very beginning of the analysis of these initial results, but they are already very promising.
All the teams at CEA who have worked for more than 10 years on the design, production, and testing of the elements we have provided for the VIS and NISP instruments are particularly proud of these initial results, which demonstrate the nominal operation of our supplies as well as the entire satellite."
The CEA and the DOE have a long and fruitful collaboration in many fields, including fusion, high-energy physics and nuclear physics, with ongoing projects bringing the two organisations together in these different areas.
On Monday 13 November 2023, CEA and DOE signed a “statement of interest” to strengthen their collaboration in accelerator and detector science and technology in preparation for the construction of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) based at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
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Dernière mise à jour : Jan 26th, 2024
