The High Radiation to Materials (HiRadMat) facility received its first beam in 2011 and has come a long way since then. Originally conceived as a dedicated test bench for the LHC collimators, it now serves as CERN’s flagship facility for high-intensity beam studies, including both R&D and physics experiments.

In its fifteen years, the HiRadMat facility has hosted more than 50 experiments, covering materials science, accelerator technologies, beam diagnostics, particle detector R&D and plasma astrophysics. It has also become a training ground for future generations of scientists and engineers, facilitating more than 20 PhD and master’s theses. As a user facility at CERN, HiRadMat has been part of several European Transnational Access programmes, making the facility accessible to researchers from Europe and all over the world.

Among the experiments currently running at HiRadMat is FIREBALL. This experiment, carried out in collaboration with the University of Oxford, is designed to study the micro-instabilities of a high-intensity electron-positron beam interacting with low-density plasma. After three successful experimental campaigns, FIREBALL-IV (HRMT-76) will focus on testing minor changes to the experimental set-up, enabling further development of previous findings.

FIREBALL’s experimental platform is the first of its kind and will continue to be improved to better serve similar studies in the HiRadMat facility. This development reflects the ongoing evolution of HiRadMat, which builds on 15 years of experience to support an increasingly diverse range of experimental programmes.