Schematic layout of CSNS
CAS is to join hands with Guangdong Province in making a proposal to jointly construct Chinese Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongwan, a booming city in the province. On 13 February, CAS President LU Yongxiang and Guangdong Governor HUANG Huahua signed a Memorandum of Cooperation on behalf of the two sides.
CAS is to join hands with South China's Guangdong Province in making a proposal to jointly construct Chinese Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongwan, a booming city in the province. On 13 February, CAS President LU Yongxiang and Guangdong Governor HUANG Huahua signed a Memorandum of Cooperation on behalf of the two sides.
As a key mega-science facility during the 11th Five-Year Plan Period (2006-2010), the 1.2 billion yuan (or US$137 million) CSNS project was approved by the central government in 2005 and has been listed in the National Long- and Medium-term Plan for S&T Development.
According to the blueprint of the CAS-Guangdong cooperation on the project, the facility will take seven years to complete with financial support from the State. Guangdong will provide the construction site, as well as matching funds for its operation and for the establishment of a national laboratory for such a research subject.
According to the agreement between the two parites, the CAS Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) will join forces with the CAS Institute of Physics to set up an IHEP branch in Dongwan as the corporate body for the CSNS construction project and the future national lab.
The CSNS accelerator is the first large-scale, high-power accelerator project to be constructed in China according to WEI Jie, one of its chief designers and a physicist from IHEP and US Brookhaven National Laboratory. It is designed to accelerate proton beam pulses to 1.6 GeV kinetic energy at 25 Hz repetition rate, striking a solid metal target to produce spallation neutrons.
The future CSNS will be a world-class facility for a new generation of neutron sources, which is characterized with high-flux, broad-wavelength, and is safer and more efficient, says Prof. ZHANG Jie, a CAS Member and director-general of the CAS Bureau for Basic Sciences. As a state-of-the-art platform for the application of multidisciplinary studies, it could be employed in a range of basic and applied realms, such as solid state physics and chemistry, materials science, life sciences, informatics, nuclear physics and nuclear medicine.
The establishment of CSNS in Guangdong will be of strategic importance for scientific research in China, says Prof. Lu, who is also vice chairman of the Standing Committee of China's top legislator, the National People's Congress. It will further rationalize the geographical layout of China's mega-science facilities, giving a new impetus to the sustainable development of basic and applied research capacities in south China, Hong Kong and Macao special administrative regions, and even in Southeast Asia, he adds.
