Particle accelerators have become essential instruments to improve our health, the environment, our safety, and our high-tech abilities, as well as to unlock new fundamental insights in physics, chemistry, biology, and generally enable scientific breakthroughs that improve our lives. Accelerating particles to higher energies will always require a large amount of energy. In a society where energy sustainability is critical, keeping energy consumption as low as reasonable possible is an unavoidable challenge for both research infrastructures (RIs) and industry, which collectively operate over 40,000 accelerators. Based on state-of-the-art technology, the portfolio of current and future accelerator-driven RIs in Europe could develop to consume up to 1% of Germany's annual electricity demand. With the ambition to maintain the attractiveness and competitiveness of European RIs and to enable Europe’s Green Deal, we propose to Innovate for Sustainable Accelerating Systems (iSAS) by establishing enhanced collaboration in the field to broaden, expedite and amplify the development and impact of novel energy-saving technologies to accelerate particles. For many frontier accelerators superconducting RF (SRF) systems are the enabling technology. The objective of iSAS is to innovate those technologies that have been identified as being a common core of SRF accelerating systemsand that have the largest leverage for energy savings with a view to minimizing the intrinsic energy consumption in all phases of operation. In the landscape of accelerator-driven RIs, solutions are being developed to reuse the waste heat produced, to develop energy-efficient magnets and to operate facilities on opportunistic schedules when energy is available. The iSAS project has a complementary focus on the energy efficiency of the SRF accelerating technologies themselves. This will contribute to the vital transition to sustain the tremendous 20th century applications of the accelerator technology in a green and energy conscious 21st century.
Based on a recently established European R&D Roadmap for accelerator technology and based on a collaboration between leading European research institutions and industry, several interconnected technologies will be developed, prototyped, and tested, each enabling significant energy savings on their own in accelerating particles. The collection of energy-saving technologies will be developed at these unique R&D Pathfinder labs with a portfolio of forthcoming applications in mind and to explore energy-saving improvements of existing RIs on the ESFRI Roadmap, for example the ESFRI Landmarks HL-LHC, ESS and EuXFEL. Considering the developments realised, the new technologies will be coherently integrated into the parametric design of a new accelerating system, a LINAC SRF cryomodule, optimised to achieve high beam-power in accelerators with an as low as reasonably possible energy consumption. This new cryomodule design will enable Europe to develop and build future energy-sustainable accelerators. The timescale to innovate, prototype and test new accelerator technologies is inherently long, in some cases longer than the typical duration of R&D projects. It is therefore essential to continue to collaborate and enhance the R&D process so that energy-sustainable technologies can be implemented without delay to avoid hampering scientific and industrial progress enabled by accelerators. Accordingly, iSAS plans to leverage operating European projects and plans for impactful co-development with industrial partners to jointly achieve a technology readiness level sufficient to enter the phase of large-scale production of the new technologies.
While the readiness of several energy-saving technologies will be prepared towards industrialisation with impact on current RIs, iSAS is also the pathfinder for sustainable future SRF particle accelerators and colliders. Through inter- and multidisciplinary research that delivers and combines various technologies, it is the long-term ambition of iSAS technologies to reduce the energy footprint of SRF accelerators in future RIs by half, and even more when the systems are integrated in Energy-Recovery LINACs. Unlocked by iSAS, Europe’s leadership will be maintained for breakthroughs in fundamental sciences and will help enable high-energy collider technology to go beyond the current frontiers of energy and intensity in an energy-sustainable way. In parallel, the new sustainable technologies will empower and stimulate European industry to conceive a portfolio of new applications and to take a leading role in, for example, the semiconductor, particle therapy, security, and environmental sectors.
