A Lancaster University professor has been awarded £10.7m to fund the particle accelerator research programme at the Cockcroft Institute until 2021.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) has renewed the core funding of the Institute whose Director is Lancaster Physics Professor Peter Ratoff.

He said: “The STFC core grant provides the basic foundations on which much of the work of the Institute is built; without it, we could not really function as a self-standing Institute in the way that we do”.

The Cockcroft Institute is a partnership between the Universities of Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and Strathclyde, and the STFC.

The core membership comprises the accelerator physics and engineering groups of the partner universities and the Accelerator Science & Technology Centre (ASTeC) of STFC at Daresbury Laboratory.

The Cockcroft Institute is the UK centre for accelerator research, including nearly 250 academics, professional accelerator staff, post-doctoral research associates, admin staff and PhD students.

It is probably the largest of its kind in the world, delivering world class R&D in Radio Frequency based systems and novel methods of acceleration with major contributions to the realization of national and international accelerator facilities.

In 2017, the UK government signed a Science & Technology agreement with the USA which committed £65 million to a neutrino physics project at Fermilab, the premier particle physics laboratory in North America.

About one third of this money will be used by Cockcroft Institute staff to construct and test particle accelerator components for Fermilab.

In November 2017, Fermilab Director Nigel Lockyer visited Daresbury Laboratory to inspect the Institute’s facilities and meet staff who will be working on the neutrino project.