Iran to develop national accelerator

Head of the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences Mohammad Javad Larijani announced on Monday that Iranian experts are working on a project to develop a National Accelerator.Speaking to FNA, Larijani said that the project is underway in Iran's Northern province of Qazvin, and noted that the National Accelerator project is even more important for the country than its other macro-scale project for building the Middle-East's most modern observatory in the Central city of Kashan. He said that Iranian accelerator is light sourced and is used in medicine, physics, engineering, agriculture and pharmacy. Larijani added that around 2 to 3 thousands Iranian scientists will work on the project. There are over 16000 accelerators in operation around the world. Only a handful of them are used in elementary particle physics research, a few hundred are used in physics and applied physics research and one- third are involved in medical applications such as therapy, imaging and the production of short lived isotopes. The other two- thirds are used for industrial applications, ranging from electron beam processing and micromachining, to food sterilization, and for national- security applications, which include X-ray inspection of cargo containers and nuclear stockpile stewardship. With the present scientific and industrial capacity, options available to Iran to build a national accelerator laboratory could be summarized as: - High energy collider for high energy physics research - A dual purpose facility that is a combination of a high energy accelerator in which light is produced as a parasitic source - Electron synchrotron dedicated only to light source. A facility such as the Iranian light source also serves as an important impetus for multidisciplinary collaboration between scientists from different research areas and from different institutions. The benefits of such scientific cross-pollinations are huge. The rapid development of the macromolecular field would not have been possible without synchrotron related collaboration between physicists and biologists. Even outside of research driven industry the need for personnel trained in a multidisciplinary environment is ever increasing. Fortunately Iran as a member of SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East ) with excellent human resources, has been in the center of the capacity building program of this organization. During the last decade many scientists and engineers have undergone training in both accelerator field and also as synchrotron radiation users. Most of the trainees have demonstrated a great deal of talent and ingenuity while working in synchrotron laboratories around the world. Iran should now take advantage of their expertise at various stages of the design and construction of the Iranian Light Source. Iranian National Accelerator project is very likely to be a synchrotron light source of around 3.0-3.5 GeV energy. The facility will produce synchrotron radiation of state of the art characteristics thereby allowing for unique investigations within a diverse range of key scientific and technological areas. The quality of a light source is most often measured by a quantity called brilliance. High brilliance implies a large number of photons emitted in a narrow cone from a small emitting surface. The higher the brilliance means you can see atomic and molecular structures better. In the last few decades the brilliance of synchrotron radiation sources has increased by 12 orders of magnitude, 1000000000000 times brighter.