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At least 415 records · Page 23
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Technical Report for Bayesian Optimization and Reinforcement Learning for Beam Polarization Increase in the BNL Hadron Injectors

This project developed and evaluated physics-informed Bayesian learning and machine learning (ML)-based optimization methods for improving beam polarization preservation in the BNL hadron injector chain. The work focused on uncertainty-aware digital twin modeling, Bayesian calibration of accelerator simulations using beam measurements, and data-efficient optimization strategies including Bayesian optimization and reinforcement learning. These methods were applied to injector tuning and RF control problems in realistic accelerator settings to support improved operational robustness and readiness for RHIC operations and future Electron–Ion Collider facilities. No subject inventions were disclosed under this award.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Machine learning at the Spallation Neutron Source accelerator and target

We describe the ongoing efforts to apply Machine Learning techniques to improve the performance of our accelerator and target. Specially, we are looking to minimize halo beam losses in the absence of a proper physics model, automatically detect and log anomalies in the target support systems such as cooling, and detect and prevent errant beam pulses in the linac. We also describe the infrastructure we use to acquire and stream data to the GPU cluster for training, our code development cycle, and edge computing for model inference. To minimize halo beam losses, we use a Reinforcement Learning technique tested on a virtual accelerator. The target anomaly detection is trained on archived data using incomplete physics models and is made part of the existing target reporting system. The errant beam prevention analyzes beam current and beam phase waveforms as well as accelerator configuration data to predict errant pulses. We also develop continual learning to adapt to changes in the accelerator.

Accelerator Physics↗
DOE OSTI2022

Hadron Polarimetry for the Electron-Ion Collider

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be the first collider to use both polarized electron beams and polarized proton and light ion beams. It will therefore offer unique opportunities to study the structure of nucleons and to answer fundamental questions in QCD. The uncertainties on the polarization measurement translate directly into the uncertainties of final physics observables. Hence, a precise measurement of the hadron beam polarization and a good control of systematic uncertainties are critical for the success of the spin program at the EIC. Contrary to the case of electron beam polarimetry, which uses physical processes derived from first principles that allow a high precision extraction of the electron beam polarization, for hadron beams no such process is available. The currently best used methods rely on the process of elastic scattering in the Coulomb-Nuclear Interference (CNI) region, for which there are only effective models available. The experience from RHIC, the only existing polarized proton collider, will be detailed and the challenges of the measurements at the EIC will be addressed. In particular, measurements of the present RHIC polarimeters and simulations of the future EIC polarimeters will be presented.

Nunes, Ana Sofia↗
DOE OSTI2026

Evaluation of a deuterated detector for gamma-ray beam intensity measurements

Laser-Compton scattering sources of quasi-monochromatic γ-ray beams have been in operation for over 30 years, with new facilities being under construction or proposed. To sustain a high-quality experimental physics program, continuous monitoring of these beams is essential by measuring the spectral, temporal, and spatial characteristics. In this work, we introduce a new method for determining the γ-ray beam intensity by using photodisintegration of deuterons in an active target detector approach. Measurements were performed using deuterated liquid scintillator detectors at several incident gamma energies between 4 and 13 MeV at the High Intensity γ-ray Source, Durham, USA. The results demonstrate that an instrument based on a deuterated active detector can be used to monitor the intensity of the γ-ray beam with high efficiency and operational simplicity.

Compton scattering↗
DOE OSTI2022

nuSTORM physics reach: cross sections and exotics

The intense beam of muon and electron neutrinos with precisely known energy distributions provided by the stored-muon facility (nuSTORM) shall allow for a rich physics program with considerable impact in our understanding of fundamental properties of neutrinos and their interactions. The physics case for such a facility is presented, with emphasis on neutrino cross section measurements and the search for exotic processes in scattering and short-baseline flavor transitions.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Neutrino Physics at a Muon Collider, and the Neutrino Kaleidoscope

Muon accelerators, a potential technology for enabling O(10 TeV) parton center of mass energy collisions, would also source an intense, collimated beam of neutrinos at TeV energies. There is currently a renewed effort to understand the possible scientific reach of such a neutrino beam in the context of neutrino physics. One possibility is the “Neutrino Kaleidoscope”: the pairing of a muon accelerator neutrino flux with a neutrino telescope detector. In particular, such a pairing would enable searches for non-standard oscillations of the beam neutrinos as they traverse the earth between source and detector. These non-standard neutrino oscillations could be sourced by Lorentz invariance violation, which a neutrino kaleidoscope could probe up to the quantum gravity-motivated Planck scale. Such a search would also have a reach on sterile neutrinos orders of magnitude beyond existing terrestrial limits. In this talk, I will introduce some of the exciting measurements being proposed with the neutrinos from a muon accelerator and then go into detail on the Neutrino Kaleidoscope concept (arxiv:2508.09249).

Putnam, Gray [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2020

Polarization preservation of polarized deuteron beams in the electron ion collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory

The physics program at the future electron ion collider (EIC) calls for polarized neutron beams at high energies. The best neutron carriers are 3 He nuclei and deuterons. Both neutron carriers are expected to be utilized by the spin physics program in the EIC. Owing to the small magnetic moment anomaly of a deuteron particle, significantly higher magnetic fields are required for spin rotation, so that full Siberian snakes are not feasible. However, the resonance strengths are weak, and the number of resonances is small. It is possible to deal with individual resonances using conventional methods such as a betatron tune jump and vertical ac dipole for intrinsic depolarizing resonances, and a weak partial snake for imperfection resonances. This study employed a realistic magnet ramp rate and parameters (both transverse and longitudinal emittances, as well as realistic lattices) to show that it is possible to accelerate polarized deuterons beyond 100 GeV/n. This paper summarizes the details of the feasibility of a polarized deuteron beam for the future EIC at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗
DOE OSTI2026

SRF cavity instability detection with machine learning at CEBAF

During the operation of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF), one or more unstable superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities often cause beam loss trips while the unstable cavities themselves do not necessarily trip off. The present RF controls for the legacy cavities report at only 1 Hz, which is too slow to detectfast transient instabilities during these trip events. These challenges make the identification of an unstable cavity out of the hundreds installed at CEBAF a difficult and time-consuming task. To tackle these issues, a fast data acquisition system (DAQ) for the legacy SRF cavities has been developed, which records the sample at 5 kHz. An unsupervised learning framework has been developed to identify anomalous SRF cavity behavior. We will discuss the present status of the DAQ system and our framework, along with recent successes in detecting anomalous cavity behavior. Overall, our method offers a practical solution for identifying unstable SRF cavities, contributing to increased beam availability and machine reliability.

Accelerator Physics↗
DOE OSTI2025

Coincident learning for beam-based rf station fault identification using phase information at the SLAC linac coherent light source

Anomalies in radio-frequency (rf) stations can result in unplanned downtime and performance degradation in linear accelerators such as SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). Detecting these anomalies is challenging due to the complexity of accelerator systems, high data volume, and scarcity of labeled fault data. Prior work identified faults using beam-based detection, combining rf amplitude and beam position monitor data. Due to the simplicity of the rf amplitude data, classical methods are sufficient to identify faults, but the recall is constrained by the low-frequency and asynchronous characteristics of the data. In this work, we leverage high-frequency, time-synchronous rf phase data to enhance anomaly detection in the LCLS accelerator. Due to the complexity of phase data, classical methods fail, and we instead train deep neural networks within the Coincident Anomaly Detection (CoAD) framework. We find that applying CoAD to phase data detects nearly 3 times as many anomalies as when applied to amplitude data, while achieving broader coverage across rf stations. Furthermore, the rich structure of phase data enables us to cluster anomalies into distinct physical categories. Through the integration of auxiliary system status bits, we link clusters to specific fault signatures, providing additional granularity for uncovering the root cause of faults. We also investigate interpretability via Shapley values, confirming that the learned models focus on the most informative regions of the data and providing insight for cases where the model makes mistakes. This work demonstrates that phase-based anomaly detection for rf stations improves both diagnostic coverage and root cause analysis in accelerator systems and that deep neural networks are essential for effective analysis.

Accelerator Physics (physics.acc-ph)↗
DOE OSTI2025

APOLLO: a facility-scale differentiable virtual accelerator at Fermilab FAST/IOTA

As the design complexity of modern accelerators grows, there is more interest in using advanced simulations that have fast execution time or yield additional insights like gradients. The FAST/IOTA facility has been working on implementing and experimentally validating an end-to-end digital twin that is both fast and gradient-aware, allowing for rapid prototyping of new software and experiments with minimal beam time costs. Our framework integrates physics and ML codes for linac and ring simulation through a set of generic interfaces between surrogate and physics-based sections. To reproduce device inputs and outputs, system state is exposed as a deterministic event loop in a specialized discrete event simulator architecture. Because Fermilab is undergoing control system transition, several APIs were implemented as final user interfaces - a fully asynchronous EPICS soft IOC, a gRPC-based Data Pool Manager (DPM), and legacy ACNET protocols. We discuss implementation details as well as challenges handling live data assimilation and future plans to extend modelling to main complex proton accelerators like PIPII and Booster.

Kuklev, Nikita [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2023

Measurement of neutrino oscillations using neutrino and antineutrino beams in the NOvA experiment

NOvA is a long-baseline accelerator neutrino oscillation experiment using the NuMIneutrino beam from Fermilab. Its main physics goals are to probe the 3-flavour oscillationparameters: neutrino mass hierarchy, CP-violating phase dcp and octant of .23 mixingangle by observing electron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance. Twofunctionally identical detectors are placed off-axis from the centre of the NuMI beam.The near detector at Fermilab is 100 m underground, and the far detector is locatedon the surface at Ash River, 810 km away from the beam source. The initial neutrinobeam spectra are measured using the near detector data and the oscillation parametersare extracted by fitting the observed data to the predicted neutrino spectrum in the fardetector.This thesis is centered around how to improve the sensitivity of |.m232| and .23 measurementsin the muon neutrino disappearance analysis. NOvA will take data for about12 years. The operation of the NOvA experiment for each year costs tens of millions ofdollars, thus it is valuable to maximise the sensitivity of the analysis. Three samples ofmuon neutrino events are studied in this thesis to improve the analysis sensitivities. First,higher energy muon neutrinos are investigated by extending the energy range in NOvA’scurrent standard analysis. Second, for the sample of events used in NOvA’s existing analysis,a new energy estimator which has been developed to improve the neutrino energy resolution is considered. Furthermore, in addition to binning the events as function ofenergy and hadronic energy fraction, three particle identifiers are introduced to separateneutrino events by signal purity to reduce the effects from backgrounds. Third, an additionallower purity sample of muon neutrino charged current (CC) events that look similarto neutral current events and have not been included in NOvA’s existing analyses havebeen studied.This thesis reanalyses NOvA’s data used in the 2020 analysis, corresponding to anexposure of 13.60×1020 protons on target (POT) in the neutrino beam mode recordedfrom February 6, 2014 to March 20, 2020, and 12.50×1020 protons on target in theantineutrino beam mode recorded between June 29, 2016 to February 26, 2019. Thisthesis has implemented a fit to Asimov fake data, generated where sin2 .23 = 0.59 and.m232 = 2.5 × 10-3 eV2. These sensitivity studies show that the uncertainty range of|.m232| at 1 s in the new analysis is reduced by 5.5% and the significance of maximaldisappearance rejection improves by 7.7%, compared to the standard analysis. This isequivalent to adding 11-16% more data. The best fit values of the oscillation parametersfrom fitting to the far detector (FD) data with the new analysis are found to besin2 .23 = 0.568+0.025-0.043 (sin2 .23 = 0.454+0.046-0.026) and .m232 = 2.399+0.055-0.070 × 10-3 eV2 (.m232= -2.427+0.055-0.067 × 10-3 eV2) for the normal (inverted) hierarchy. The difference in thebest fit for sin2 .23 (.m232) between the new analysis and NOvA’s 2020 analysis is around2% (1.4%). The uncertainty range at 1 s for .m232 decrease by 8% (4%) for the normalhierarchy (inverted hierarchy) compared to the standard analysis. The uncertainty rangefor sin2 .23 is close to the standard analysis. This thesis also implements the fit from combiningelectron neutrino appearance and muon neutrino disappearance. The combinedanalysis shows that the best fit values are very close to the standard analysis. However,the uncertainty range of .m232 at 1 s is reduced by 3.7% using the new analysis. The maximaldisappearance significance is not improved in the new analysis, but the new analysisslightly improves the rejection of the disfavoured octant.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2025

Wire Plane Transparency: Commissioning the Time Projection Chambers for the Short-Baseline Near Detector

The Short Baseline Near Detector (SBND) serves as the near detector for Fermilab's Short Baseline Neutrino (SBN) programme. It is a 112-ton Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) designed to study neutrino-argon interactions and search for new physics phenomena such as sterile neutrinos. Situated just 110 m from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB), SBND just began its first physics run and is expected to record over two million neutrino interactions annually. Commissioning the time projection chambers of SBND is crucial for optimising detector performance. Each of the two anodes is composed of three charge-sensing wire planes which detect drifting ionisation electrons from charged particles traversing the detector. The wire planes, arranged with different 2D orientations, facilitate the 3D reconstruction of neutrino interactions. Electron transport induces signals on the first two planes, with the signal being collected by the rear plane. The first two induction planes require transparency to ensure all drift electrons reach the collection plane. This transparency depends on the bias voltages applied to the wires and the spacing between them. Fine-tuning these bias voltages ensures the optimisation of wire plane transparency. In this poster, I will demonstrate how transparency can be assessed by analysing the waveforms from cosmic-ray muon tracks traversing the detector at specific orientations.

McCusker, Bethany [Unlisted, US]↗
DOE OSTI2025

R&D Program for HEP High-Power Targets at Fermilab

A high-power target system is a key beam element to complete future High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments. In the recent past, major accelerator facilities have been limited in beam power not by their accelerators, but by the beam intercepting device survivability. The target must then endure high power pulsed beam, leading to high cycle thermal stresses/pressures and thermal shocks. The increased beam power will also create significant challenges such as corrosion and radiation damage that can cause harmful effects on the material and degrade their mechanical and thermal properties during irradiation. This can eventually lead to the failure of the material and drastically reduce the lifetime of targets and beam intercepting devices. In order to operate reliable beam-intercepting devices in the framework of energy and intensity increase projects of the future, it is essential to develop a strong R&D program and have synergy with various expertise. After presenting the high power targetry challenges facing next generation multi-MW accelerators, we will give an overview of Fermilab’s R&D program in support of High Power Targetry development. The RaDIATE collaboration (Radiation Damage In Accelerator Target Environment), managed by Fermilab, also draws on existing expertise in related fields to execute a coordinated strategy for high power targetry R&D between the 14 international member institutions.

Pellemoine, Frederique [Fermilab]↗
DOE OSTI2025

Accelerator Neutrinos

Neutrino beams from particle accelerators are vital for probing fundamental physics, enabling experiments like DUNE and NOvA to study neutrino oscillations and CP violation. These experiments push proton beam power to multi-MW levels and require precise beam instrumentation to manage flux and enhance precision. This talk will explore advancements in neutrino beam technology, highlighting the challenges and future prospects of high-intensity, well-collimated beams for next-generation accelerator facilities. Neutrino beams from particle accelerators are vital for probing fundamental physics, enabling experiments like DUNE and NOvA to study neutrino oscillations and CP violation. These experiments push proton beam power to multi-MW levels and require precise beam instrumentation to manage flux and enhance precision. This talk will explore advancements in neutrino beam technology, highlighting the challenges and future prospects of high-intensity, well-collimated beams for next-generation accelerator facilities.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

SPACE: 3D parallel solvers for Vlasov-Maxwell and Vlasov-Poisson equations for relativistic plasmas with atomic transformations

A parallel, relativistic, three-dimensional particle-in-cell code SPACE has been developed for the simulation of electromagnetic fields, relativistic particle beams, and plasmas. In addition to the standard second-order Particle-in-Cell (PIC) algorithm, SPACE includes efficient novel algorithms to resolve atomic physics processes such as multi-level ionization of plasma atoms, recombination, and electron attachment to dopants in dense neutral gases. SPACE also contains a highly adaptive particle-based method, called Adaptive Particle-in-Cloud (AP-Cloud), for solving the Vlasov-Poisson problems. It eliminates the traditional Cartesian mesh of PIC and replaces it with an adaptive octree data structure. The code's algorithms, structure, capabilities, parallelization strategy, and performance have been discussed. Additionally, typical examples of SPACE applications to accelerator science and engineering problems are described.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗