Peter M. McIntyre

Peter Mastin McIntyre III is Mitchell-Heep Professor of Experimental Physics at Texas A&M University and President of Accelerator Technology Corp. He studied at the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. in 1973. He performed experiments with colliding beams at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland until 1975, then joined Harvard University as Assistant Professor. In 1976 he was the first to propose to make colliding beams of protons and antiprotons using the large synchrotrons at Fermilab and at CERN. This work led to the discovery of the weak bosons at CERN in 1982. He developed several techniques for cooling intense beams of antiprotons. In 1980 he was awarded an IR100 award for the invention of a technique for high- efficiency collection of intense electron beams. Dr. McIntyre is an A.P. Sloan Foundation fellow, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and he is listed in Who's Who in America.

Superconducting magnet technology:

• 3 T superferric dipole for SSC in which the low reluctance of steel is used to produce homogeneous field, simple fabrication, and efficient use of superconductor.
• stress management and SuperCIC hybrid windings for ultra-high-field dipoles.
• 4 Tesla self-shielded whole-body solenoid for functional brain imaging;
• the first self-shielded solenoid for MR spectroscopy.
• a superconducting dipole for MR well logging.
• 40 kA blocks-in-conduit REBCO cable with cross-flow cooling and co-wound armor, capable of driving 20 T at 20 K, for the toroids and solenoids of compact tokamaks for fusion energy.
• 1.5 T Open-MR imager for walk-through breast imaging, to support well-patient screening to detect early-stage breast cancer at a cost comparable to mammography.
• Conformally mapped REBCO/Cu tape windings for dipoles, in which each turn contains multiple tapes in face contact, each turn is configured so that the tape face is closely parallel to so the tapes operate with maximum critical current, and current is shared within the tapes.

Superconducting materials technology:

• Prof. McIntyre has developed superconducting wire and cable with unique properties for practical applications:
• Textured-powder Bi-2212 multi-filament wire, in which fine-powder Bi-2212 is uniaxially compressed to form trapezoidal-cross-section bars with >80% texture of the a-b planes, the bars are assembled into a symmetric billet, and the billet is extruded and drawn to fine wire.
• SuperCIC cable, containing cylindrical shells of superconducting wire cabled onto a hollow perforated center tube, inserted into an armor sheath, and the sheath is drawn down to compress the wires against the center tube and immobilize them.
• Nb-coated W structure for superconducting rf cavities, in which a cavity structure is fabricated by 3-D printing of W nanopowder, its inner surfaces are coated with Nb, and the structure is heat-treated at ~2500 C to melt and re-crystallize the Nb layer and volatilize all impurities.

Accelerator physics:

• Prof. McIntyre has articulated a cost-minimum design for an ultimate-energy hadron collider: the Collider in the Sea. The collider ring is housed in a ~2000 km circular pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, supported with neutral buoyancy at 100 m depth, positioned using marine
• thrusters, and producing high-luminosity colliding beams at 500 TeV collision energy. The dipole utilizes conformally mapped REBCO/Cu tape windings and can operate at 25 K, cooled by a flow of liquid hydrogen. The beam dynamics is dominated by synchrotron damping, and bottoms-up stacking can be used to sustain luminosity of >5x10 35 cm -2 s -1 indefinitely.
• the strong-focusing cyclotron, in which superconducting quadrupole focusing channels are arrayed on the pole faces of the sector dipoles to provide alternating-gradient focusing to each orbit. A folded-lobe superconducting cavity structure that provides high-gradient acceleration in such a cyclotron so that the orbits are sufficiently separated for the quadrupole channels to effectively guide each orbit. Applications include medical isotope synthesis, ADS fission in a molten salt core for safe nuclear fission power, and high-flux neutron damage facilities.
• Prof. McIntyre invented the polyhedral structure for superconducting linac cavities for linac colliders and free-electron lasers. A multi-cell cavity is formed as a Roman arch assembly of polyhedral wedge segments in which each wedge has its inner surface contoured to form the ellipsoidal shape desired for the accelerating mode. The joints between wedge segments offer the possibility to internally suppress all dipole-type higher-order modes by intercepting and terminating azimuthal currents.

Institutional Partnerships

• Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics & Astronomy

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