The 2008 SRF Materials Workshop will be held October 29th- 31st on the campus of Michigan State University (MSU), East Lansing, Michigan, United States. The workshop will be hosted by the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), the MSU College of Engineering and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL).

The 2008 SRF Materials Workshop is a continuation of the series of topical workshops started in 2001 at FNAL. The workshop’s scientific goal is to build connections between fundamental materials science and SRF technology to understand limits, validate processes, and seek breakthroughs in performance. The workshop’s social goals are to promote SRF materials research activity, encourage inter-disciplinary studies, further expand SRF research to more universities, invite early industry participation and strengthen the collaboration between national laboratories and academic institutes. The target attendance is laboratory and university researchers, industry manufacturers, and government program managers. The workshop will be 2.5 days in length. Attendance is by invitation only, and will largely consist of U.S. researchers.

The workshop will be organized along the lines of the Gordon Conferences, including overview presentations, contributed presentations, and group discussions. For 2008, we anticipate the following areas of discussion:

1. Issues that drive materials research
   1. Recent cavity results: bad vs good and implications for materials research
   2. Whole-cavity characterization: T-maps, bore-scopes, etc.
   3. QA and QC: are there smoking guns? Do batch-to-batch differences matter?
   4. Welding and weld defects
2. Niobium materials science (mostly university and lab work)
   1. Fundamental issues – vortices, heat transfer
   2. Natural and artificial surface growth – oxides, adsorbed layers, nitrides, hydrides, carbides, etc.
   3. Layer removal – science of etching, chemical action, mechanical action, plasmas, etc.
   4. Surface characterization, new tools, etc.
   5. Bulk niobium, mechanical properties, texture etc.
   6. New materials, geometries
   7. Testing – quest for a “short sample” test, special configurations to gain knowledge, etc.
3. Innovations (mostly industry and collaborations)
   1. Processing, post-treatments, etc.
   2. Forming, welding, etc.
4. Opportunities
   1. Technology goals in view of P5 and post-Omnibus: An opportunity for more R&D?
   2. Seamless cavity forming – Does it deserve a look to avoid weld defects?
      1. Tubes, single-crystal tubes, etc. – what raw materials do we need?
      2. Testing, modeling
      3. Forming cavities

Details and other information pertinent to the workshop will be posted on the 2008 SRF Materials and Hydroforming workshop website: http://meetings.nscl.msu.edu/srfmatsci/. Please register (registration free) and submit abstracts for the workshop online by October 10th, 2008. For questions, please contact the local workshop chair, Chris Compton at compton@nscl.msu.edu or email Laura Popielarski at lpopiela@nscl.msu.edu.

Please forward this circular to any of your collaborators whom you think might be interested in attending the 2008 SRF Materials and Hydroforming Workshop. We hope to see you at the workshop in October!

Workshop scientific committee members:
Helen Edwards (Fermilab, Chair)
Alex Gurevich (Florida State University)
Charles Reece, Peter Kneisel (Jlab)
Hasan Padamsee (Cornell)
Chris Compton, Tom Bieler (MSU)
Mike Pellin (ANL)
Bruce Strauss (DOE)
Bill Weng (DOE)

International advisors: C. Antoine (Saclay/Fermilab/ Co-chair), W. Singer (DESY), K. Saito (KEK).

Local organizing members: C. Compton, T. Bieler, N. Wright, L. Popielarski.