The GALORE project

Bent crystals are a compact and versatile tool to manipulate ultra-relativistic particle beams in accelerators. Indeed, the unrivaled steering power achievable exploiting channeling of particles between the atomic planes is comparable to that of a 102−3 Tesla magnetic dipole. Since the first experiments in the 1980s, extensive research has been delivering important results for new physics experiments and applications in accelerators. The substantial technological development, accompanied by reliable Monte Carlo simulations, has increased the steering efficiency from a few % to the intrinsic maximum efficiency of ∼ 80%, limited by scattering of the particles with nuclei inside the crystal. The recently started two-year (2022–2023) project GALORE of INFN aims to assess experimentally the possibility to overcome this hard limit by developing a new generation of bent crystals, featuring an innovative geometry characterized by a crystalline microstructure which influences particle dynamic in the crystal lattice to boost efficiency close to 100%. The manufacturing process will exploit well-established techniques developed for silicon microelectronics, and experimental testing will be carried out at the extracted beamlines of CERN North Area with high-energy hadron beams. The success of this project could strongly impact the employment of bent crystal in frontier energy accelerators, boosting performance of already proposed schemes as well as enabling completely inedited use of bent crystal in particle physics experiment in accelerators.