A few memories from the days at LEP

摘要

My first contact with the LEP project (Large Electron-Positron Collider Ring between electron and positron beams) goes back to 1979, when the Executive Director General at the time, John Adams, invited me into his office and spoke to me in approximately these terms: "Emilio, instead of setting your heart on the running of superconducting cavities to detect, eventually, gravitational waves, why don't you set up a research group at CERN to design and develop a system of superconducting radiofrequency cavities in order to accelerate the electrons and positrons at LEP?" That is exactly what I did, organizing the activity of the CERN group of Philippe Bernard in collaboration with the European groups1 already working in that field. We drew up the techniques for diagnostics, up to that time of a doubtful performance, these enabled us to obtain very high electric field gradients in a new designed cavity to eliminate the multipactor cavities. Thus we could design and build, in collaboration with European Industries, a superconducting radiofrequency cavity system capable of accelerating electrons and positrons to an energy of 120 GeV per beam.