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MOSCOW, April 18Specialists of the Rosatom fuel company TVEL have completed the development of a domestic technology for manufacturing sheets of high-purity niobium used in the creation of the largest research «megascientific» installations, scientists from Asia are showing interest in this result, the press service of TVEL reported.
Sheets of high-purity niobium are used as the basis for the manufacture of superconducting resonators — devices that create an electric field to accelerate elementary charged particles: protons, ions and electrons. It is particle accelerators that are the main tool of scientists in modern experimental physics. Technologies based on superconducting resonators form the basis of research facilities for major scientific projects of the «megascience» class, such as NICA (Dubna, Russia), XFEL (Germany, with the participation of Russia), FCC (European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN, Switzerland), CEPC ( China), ILC (Japan), MYRRHA (Belgium).
Despite the fact that Rosatom has the competence in the manufacture of superconductors at the level of world leaders, until now there has been no production of sheets in Russia from high purity niobium. Such technology was owned by only a few companies from Japan, the USA, China and the European Union.
“The idea of creating our own Russian technology for manufacturing materials from ultrapure niobium first arose as a result of many years of scientific cooperation between the TVEL fuel company and CERN in the development of superconducting niobium-tin strands for particle accelerators. The CERN specification corresponding to the most high performance for similar materials achieved in the world today.
The Russian technology for the production of these sheets was developed by specialists from TVEL enterprises — the Bochvar High-Technological Research Institute of Inorganic Materials (Moscow) and the Chepetsky Mechanical Plant (Glazov, Udmurtia).
Rosatom Fuel Company TVEL has expanded its range of world-class innovative products and is ready to provide mega-science-class scientific projects with high-purity niobium products. This achievement strengthens not only Russia's technological sovereignty in conducting scientific research, but also export potential. In particular, scientists from the Asian region show interest in our resonator niobium to create their own prototype of a new type of superconducting linear particle accelerator,» said Alexander Ugryumov, Senior Vice President for Scientific and Technical Activities of TVEL, whose words are given in the message.