Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research

Just after the Big Bang occurred, conditions became ideal for the building blocks of matter — the quarks and electrons — to be formed. But time scales work in billionth of trillionth of a second, and even smaller during this stage of the universe’s existence. A few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons. Within milliseconds, these protons and neutrons combined into nuclei.

Yet scientists do not understand the physics that let matter as we know today emerge. The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is one of the largest international research facilities in the world being built at Darmstadt, Germany. The project brings together 3,000 scientists from 50 countries to study the structure of matter and its evolution.

The facility will be the biggest radioactive beam accelerator facility in the world. It will recreate the extreme conditions such as high temperatures, pressures and densities by bombarding samples of matter with particles. The construction of the project started in 2017 and the facility will likely start operating by 2025. About 550 magnets of up to 1.6 Tesla will be required for this facility, each of which will need a power converter. The key component of FAIR is a ring accelerator with a circumference of 1,100 meters. The entire facility spans over a site of 20 hectares.

Samit Mandal, a faculty member of Delhi University and one of the member scientists at FAIR, said, “Our Industries are involved to supply all those power converters. Around 80 have already been supplied. “The vacuum chamber required in this project is very unique, which we are building in India with collaboration of German scientists. Two of them have already been sent for testing.” The vacuum chamber’s internal pressures will be extremely low to ensure that no unwanted particle interacts with the radioactive beam. “We are also proposing to build a big superconducting magnet of the order of 6 to 7 Tesla,” Mandal said in an interaction with reporters.

The findings from the project are expected to yield next generation spin off technologies in the field of medical imaging. The research could also help develop nuclear batteries that would have the capacity to store much more power than lithium-ion batteries.