THE START OF THE IRIS PROJECT FOR THE HIGH TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTIVITY APPLICATION
- 16 NOVEMBRE 2022
The kick-off meeting of the IRIS project took place at the INFN Headquarters during two days on November 14th and 15th. The project has recently received a grant from the PNRR (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza) funds for the Research Infrastructure mission.
IRIS, of which INFN is both the proponent and the lead institution, will create a distributed infrastructure throughout the national territory, focusing on developing high temperature and high magnetic field superconducting technologies both for civil applications, such as connection cables for electricity transport and for the reduction of energy losses, as well as for the construction of magnets for next generation particle accelerators, in particular for the Future Circular Collider (FCC), the large particle collider proposed to replace LHC at CERN. The project has an estimated duration of 30 months and the project is financed by a contribution of 60 million euros, where over 50% will go to the laboratories in the South of Italy.
Pierluigi Campana, member of the INFN council and scientific coordinator of the project, explains that “IRIS is a virtuous example of how basic research, and in this case particle and accelerator physics, can provide an important application in other science areas, such as the development of new materials for energy saving that is essential for the creation of high-power cables without dissipation and suitable for the needs of future electricity networks serving new energy sources.”
