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40 years of accelerating knowledge

Frank Tecker, Hermann Schmickler and Christine Vollinger take a look at the history, impact and future of the CERN Accelerator School.

Forty years ago, the accelerator world looked quite different to what it is now. With the web yet to be invented, communication relied on telephones and written texts received via faxes or letters. Available information existed in the form of published books, conference proceedings or scripts from university lectures. Accelerator-physics models were essentially based on approximate solutions of differential equations, or on even simpler linearisation of the problem at hand. Technologies relied on experience from accelerators that had previously worked well, with new concepts tested after sometimes cumbersome calculations and usually by building prototypes. Completely new accelerator technologies such as superconducting magnets required the construction of full-size accelerators (such as the Tevatron at Fermilab) to learn, often painfully, about the phenomenon and impact of persistent current decays.