AdA at Orsay

Abstract

AbstractAdA, acronym for Anello di Accumulazione in Italian, was the first electron−positron storage ring ever built and operated. During a meeting held in the Frascati National Laboratories in February 1960, Bruno Touschek had proposed to equip these Laboratories with an accelerator of a new kind that would allow the investigation of matter−antimatter annihilation. Soon after, Touschek designed AdA, an e+e− storage ring prototype. Quickly built, AdA was first commissioned in Frascati where the behavior of the counter rotating beams was investigated in the low stored particle number regime. Then, in 1962, AdA was brought on a truck to the Orsay Laboratoire de l’Accélérateur Linéaire to benefit from the high intensity electron linear accelerator available there. The commissioning was then continued by a small Italo-French collaboration which pursued the study of the machine performances, collective effects included. Exploring this entirely new accelerator physics domain was a unique and exciting period for the team. It lasted close to two years during which the beam lifetime limitations, the size of the stored bunches and the particle-antiparticle collision rate were measured. By the end of that period, the basic underlying concept of e+e− colliders was established, showing that the road to future powerful colliders was open.