From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An Oak Ridge employee on the SPS beamline
Hadron Colliders: Past, Present, and Future
Intersecting Storage Rings	CERN, 1971–1984
Super Proton Synchrotron	CERN, 1981–1984
ISABELLE	BNL, cancelled in 1983
Tevatron	Fermilab, 1987–2009
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider	BNL, operational since 2000
Superconducting Super Collider	cancelled in 1993
Large Hadron Collider	CERN, 2007–2020s
Very Large Hadron Collider	mid-to-late 21st century

The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) is a particle accelerator at CERN. Originally specified as a 300 GeV proton machine, the SPS was actually built to be capable of 400GeV, an operating energy it achieved on the official commissioning date of 17 June 1976. However, by that time this energy had been exceeded by Fermilab, who reached an energy of 500 GeV on May 14 of that year.

The SPS was designed by a team led by CERN director-general of what was then known as Laboratory II, Sir John Adams.

The SPS has also been used to accelerate antiprotons, electrons and positrons (for use as the injector for CERN's LEP electron-positron collider) and heavy ions. Its finest hour was undoubtedly as a proton-antiproton collider (as such it was called ) from 1981 to 1984, when its beams provided the data for the UA1 and UA2 experiments, which resulted in the discovery of the W and Z bosons, earning a Nobel Prize for Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer in 1984.

Now the SPS is used to provide 400 GeV protons beams for a number of active fixed-target experiments, notably Compass and NA48.

The SPS is to be used as the final pre-injector for high-intensity proton beams for CERN's Large Hadron Collider, scheduled to begin operation in 2007, accelerating protons from 26GeV to 450GeV. Operation as pre-injector will still allow to continue the ongoing fixed target research program. The SPS will also be used to produce a neutrino stream to be detected at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory, 730 km from CERN.

The SPS has served as an ideal testbench for the new concepts in accelerator physics. It served as an observatory for the electron cloud phenomena ^[1] in 2000. Few years later, in 2003, SPS was the first machine where the Hamiltonian resonance driving terms were directly measured ^[2]. In 2004 experiments to cancel the detrimental effects of beam encounters (like those in the LHC) were carried out using a wire ^[3].

It has been proposed that the Large Hadron Collider will require an upgrade to considerably increase its luminosity by 2015. This will need an upgrade in all the pre-injector chain, including the SPS. The most rewarding improvement will consist on increasing the extraction energy of the Super-SPS up to 1 TeV ^[4].

1. ^ observation of e-cloud
2. ^ Measurement of resonance driving terms
3. ^ wire compensation
4. ^ Super-SPS

Coordinates: 46°14′06″N, 6°02′33″E