INNOVATION November-December 2014

around the world. It will also help to attract the best and the brightest to BC to work with it.” Operated by a consortium of 19 Canadian universities, TRIUMF is one among only a handful of subatomic research facilities in the world that spe- cialize in producing extremely intense beams of particles. It includes the world’s biggest cyclotron, which is used to

the first phase of ARIEL officially began on September 1, 2010. Phase one involved design- ing and constructing the ARIEL building adjacent to TRIUMF’s existing cyclotron facility (some of the walls in ARIEL are a remarkable nine feet thick); designing, building and install- ing the e-linac on the lower floors of the cyclotron building; and designing and constructing

an underground beam tunnel to connect the accelerator to the isotope-production area. This fall, the e-linac produced its first particle beam at an initial energy of 23 million electron volts (MeV). Over the next five years, in phase two of the project, it will move up to 50 MeV per beam line, and the project team will build the isotope- production targets for the beams to hit. These highly sophisticated targets are made of chemical elements such as tantalum and located within specially-shielded halls. Eventually, isotopes will be extracted from the targets around-the-clock in real time, and sent to experimental areas in non-stop streams of exotic nuclei. Faculty and students from the 19 collaborating universities across Canada will be able to run experiments through ARIEL, as well as scientists from around the world. The project’s major challenge so far, says Eric Guetre (whose job “is a mix of project management and system engineering, but mostly making sure things get done on time and on budget, and that it’s all assembled correctly”), was getting the e-linac’s superconduct- ing radio-frequency (SRF) cavities to

accelerate 1,000 trillion particles a second. Since 1975, scientists from more than 25 countries have come to TRIUMF to run experiments that are only possible with these unusual particle beams. Once the new e-linac project is complete, the rare isotopes produced by ARIEL’s beams will be used to study such huge questions as how stars burn and their role in creating the elements essential for human life (according to Koscielniak, Joni Mitchell got it right when she sang, “we are stardust”) and exactly where the elements of the periodic table come from. They will also be used in critical medical research, diagnosis and treatment, particu- larly for cancer. One example: scientists will study the rare isotope Astatine-211 to determine if it is suitable for treat- ing brain cancer by delivering radiation directly to the tumour. “It’s been amazing to work on a project this complex and a machine this big,” says Eric Guetre, P.Eng., ARIEL Project Engineer. “It will triple the vol- ume of isotope experiments scientists can carry out, and produce science that will lead to tremendous discoveries that will help Canadians every day.”

Top: UVic Professor Dean Karlen, principal investigator for the ARIEL e-linac project, passionately describes the design of the ARIEL e-linac cryomodule to UVic President Jamie Cassels. Photo credit: Kim Stallknecht Bottom: Close-up view of a superconducting cavity resonator built by PAVAC Industries of Richmond for the ARIEL electron accelerator. PAVAC is one of only a handful of companies worldwide capable of producing such cavities to the exacting requirements demanded.

the point where they were perfectly smooth. These cavities, made of the rare metal niobium and structured more or less like beads on a string, contain the radio-frequency electromag- netic field that accelerates charged particles. Manufactured by Richmond-based PAVAC Industries, Inc., ARIEL’s first cavity took a very long time to produce. “It was a challenge in manufacturing and in the welding process,” says Guetre. “The cavity, which is made up of nine cells, must be very precise in shape and finish. There can be no surface defects if it’s going to meet performance standards. Eliminating imperfections, and then getting the manufacturing time down, was essential, but the SRF team did it.” Currently, only a handful of companies in the world make accelerator cavities, largely because, says Koscielniak, “it can take at least two years to get close to the realms of quality control we need. It’s difficult technology.” Now that PAVAC Industries has joined that elite group, it has already signed the first of what could

It’s also proof, he says, that it’s possible to work on Big Science projects here in BC. “As an engineer, you don’t have to go to Europe or the US to work on something this exciting.” Koscielniak explains that there are two ways to do innovation: “bleeding edge—high risk R&D that could lead to high payoff—or integration, where you take existing leading-edge technologies and integrate them into something new.” ARIEL is the second kind, integrating existing technologies such as radio-frequency (RF) power and cryogenics into “something we were pretty certain we could pull off.” The University of Victoria put forward the formal proposal for the project to the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) in 2009, and is responsible for overall project oversight. With fund- ing in place from the federal government through the CFI and the National Research Council Canada, and the BC provincial govern- ment through the Knowledge Development Fund, planning for

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