New Project at Jefferson Lab Aims to Use Machine Learning to Improve Up-Time of Particle Accelerators

NEWPORT NEWS, Va., Jan. 30, 2020 – More than 1,600 nuclear physicists worldwide depend on the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility for their research. Located at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va., CEBAF is a DOE User Facility that is scheduled to conduct research for limited periods each year, so it must perform at its best during each scheduled run. But glitches in any one of CEBAF's tens of thousands of components can cause the particle accelerator to temporarily fault and interrupt beam delivery, sometimes by mere seconds but other times by many hours. Now, accelerator scientists are turning to machine learning in hopes that they can more quickly recover CEBAF from faults and one day even prevent them. Anna Shabalina is a Jefferson Lab staff member and principal investigator on the project, which has been funded by the Laboratory Directed Research & Development program for the fiscal year 2020.