Cooling technique helps researchers 'target' a major component for a new collider.
by @physorg_com

Although a lot of time and effort in particle physics are devoted to finding ways to increase the energy of certain experiments, sometimes it is even more important to find ways to safely, quickly and easily remove energy from an experiment.
Researchers at the U.S.
Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory have recently developed a new ultra-low-friction sliding contact mechanism that uses chilled water to remove heat from a key component of a next-generation collider.
"When you think about driving a car, you have to use friction to brake your wheels," said Wei Gai, an Argonne high-energy physicist and leader of the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator group.
"For us, the key challenge was in finding a way to have a brake-like contact of metal pads against a high speeding wheel without much friction." For the past two years, Gai and his colleagues have been attempting to assemble a working prototype for a key component of the proposed future International Linear Collider (ILC).
This device, called a "positron target," would enable scientists to produce positrons, the antimatter sibling particle of the electron.