Bjørn H. Wiik Prize 2005
Bjørn H. Wiik Prize
Bjørn H. Wiik Prize 2005
Award for Outstanding Work: Bjørn H. Wiik Prize 2005 goes to Dr. Lutz Lilje
The Bjørn H. Wiik Prize 2005 goes to Dr. Lutz Lilje, honouring his outstanding contributions to the development of superconducting resonators with very high gradients. On June 2nd, 2005, Professor Albrecht Wagner presented the award during the open session of the DESY Extended Scientific Council.
The work of Dr. Lutz Lilje has made a decisive contribution to the improvement of superconducting technology. This created an important prerequisite for the decision to build the European X-ray laser XFEL as well as the International Linear Collider (ILC) with superconducting technology.
Already in 2002, Lutz Lilje had obtained good results, together with the colleagues of KEK, when the scientists achieved an accelerating gradient of 35 MV/m in a 9-cell niobium resonator with the method of electrolytic polishing. This procedure leads to a highly polished inner surface of the resonators with minimum heat losses in the metal walls at high accelerating gradients.
When the technique of electropolishing was also introduced at DESY, the team of scientists was able to measure accelerating gradients of 35 - 40 MV/m with a quality factor Q of 1010, first at one-cell resonators and currently at 9-cell resonators. With these gradients the superconducting accelerating structures of an international linear collider could accelerate particles to collision energies of approx. 1 teraelectronvolt.
The Bjørn H. Wiik Prize acknowledges outstanding contributions of scientists to the DESY research programs or to the advancement of DESY technical development projects.