Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC)
Formed in 2007, STFC are a world-leading multi-disciplinary science organisation, with a goal to deliver economic, societal, scientific, and international benefits to the UK and its people – and more broadly to the world. Our strength comes from our distinct but interrelated functions:
- Universities: we support university-based research, innovation and skills development in astronomy, particle physics, nuclear physics and accelerator science.
- Scientific Facilities: we provide access to world-leading, large-scale facilities across a range of physical and life sciences, enabling research, innovation, and skills training in these areas.
- National Campuses: we work with partners to build National Science and Innovation Campuses based around our National Laboratories to promote academic and industrial collaboration and translation of our research to market through direct interaction with industry.
- Inspiring and Involving: we help ensure a future pipeline of skilled and enthusiastic young people by using the excitement of our sciences to encourage wider take-up of STEM subjects in school and future life (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
STFC support an academic community of around 1,700 in particle physics, nuclear physics, and astronomy including accelerator science, who work at more than 50 universities and research institutes in the UK, Europe, Japan and the United States, including a rolling cohort of more than 900 PhD students.
The Cockcroft Institute (CI)
The Cockcroft Institute is a partnership between the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and Strathclyde, and STFC. The core membership comprises the accelerator physics and engineering groups of the partner universities and the Accelerator Science and Technology Centre (ASTeC) of STFC at Daresbury Laboratory.
The CI is the de facto national centre for accelerator R&D in the UK. The institute comprises just over 200 academics, professional accelerator staff, post-doctoral research associates, administrative staff and PhD students, making it probably the largest of its kind in the world. Our activities include world-class R&D in RF-based systems and novel methods of acceleration with major contributions to the realisation of national and international accelerator facilities. Cross-cutting applications allow this expertise to be used to address global challenges in health, security, energy, manufacturing and the environment, and to train the next generation of accelerator experts in areas where there is a recognised international skills shortage. We also inspire school students and the general public through our extensive public engagement programmes.
The institute provides the intellectual focus, educational infrastructure and the essential scientific and technological facilities for accelerator science and technology research and development. This enables CI scientists and engineers to take a major role in innovating future tools for scientific discoveries and in the conception, design, construction, and use of the world’s leading research accelerators.
John Adams Institute (JAI)
The John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science (JAI) was created in October 2004 in response to an initiative by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and the Council for the Central Laboratory for the Research Councils (now merged into the Science and Technology Research Council) to foster accelerator R&D in the universities.
The next generation of particle physics needs the next generation of particle accelerators. The John Adams Institute is a UK and World leading research group dedicated to the research and development of particle accelerators.
Particle Accelerators are the huge machines that boost particles, the smallest components of nature, to speeds very close to the speed of light. Beams of these particles are collided, and in the wreckage strange new particles emerge. By looking at what new particles come out and how they come out, we can learn more about the structure of the universe itself.
Smaller particle accelerators also exist, and these can have applications closer to home such as in Archaeology, Zoology and Medicine.
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