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Pantaleo Raimondi wins 2017 Gersh Budker prize

18-05-2017

The European Physical Society Accelerator Group (EPS-AG) has awarded the ESRF’s Accelerator & Source Director, Dr. Pantaleo Raimondi, the 2017 Gersh Budker Prize, for his outstanding contribution to the accelerator field in the form of his “invention of the Hybrid Multi Bend Achromat (HMBA) lattice”, “which has become the design basis of most future 4th generation synchrotron sources”.

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Awarded once every 2-3 years, the prestigious Gersh Budker Prize recognizes a recent, significant, original contribution to the accelerator field. The Prize was awarded today, 18 May 2017, during the International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC’17, in Copenhagen (DK).

According to the EPS-AG, the HMBA-lattice “shows Raimondi’s ability to foster new ideas, his deep understanding of accelerator physics and mastering of technological aspects.” This Prize is also a great honour for the ESRF as the design has inspired the design of other big light-source facilities around the world, as underlined by the EPS-AG: “The HMBA-lattice has been adopted as the basis for the design for most future 4th generation storage ring light sources such as the Advanced Photon Source upgrade at Argonne National Laboratory and the Advanced Light Source Upgrade at Berkeley Lab in the US (APS-U and ALS-U); Spring8-2 at the Japan Synchrotron Radiation Research Institute; and the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility in China (SSRF and IHEP)”.

The new lattice will improve the brilliance of the ESRF light source by a factor of 100 while fulfilling the constraint to keep the original beam line structure, thanks to an innovative magnet design. With its larger dynamic aperture, smaller sextupole settings and smaller emittance with respect to previous proposals, the HMBA-lattice has made a large impact on the light source community.

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It is currently being implemented at the ESRF as the foundation of the €150M Extremely Brilliant Source upgrade project, lasting from 2015 to 2020. Presently in the component procurement and production phase, the project will see the facility’s user program put on hold at the end of 2018 while the existing accelerator is removed and new girders pre-assembled with the novel magnet arrangement are installed and commissioned in the storage ring before the start-up of the user programme in summer 2020. This will be followed by the construction of new state-of-the-art beamlines, an ambitious instrumentation programme with a particular focus on high-performance detectors and an intensified ‘big data’ strategy, designed to exploit the enhanced brilliance, coherence flux and performances of the new X-ray synchrotron source.

Dr. Raimondi’s ability to foster new ideas is based on a long and rich experience in research and development at accelerators including ENEA, CERN, SLAC and INFN, where he gained in-depth knowledge of all aspects of accelerator design and commissioning, from the development of RF power systems, linacs and microtrons to the operation, design and realisation of linear and circular colliders. During a career spanning 30 years, he has written over 300 publications and developed several new techniques, including the revolutionary “crab waist scheme” implemented at the DAFNE PHI-Factory in Italy in 2009 that significantly improved luminosity in the circular electron-positron colliders and strongly influenced the development of similar kinds of accelerators.

Dr Raimondi said, “I am very pleased and honoured to be nominated for the award. This is a very important recognition of all the efforts made by the accelerator community to improve the performance of storage rings and to extend the scientific reach of the research based on such machines.

Top image: Dr. Pantaleo Raimondi, ESRF Accelerator & Source division