Accelerator Physics

The purpose of this Wikibook is to provide as much information as possible for various accelerator physics topics and terms.

Ideally, each contributor is supposed to append the contents when the term/item already exists but he/she knows more about this field, or to modify the contents if he/she finds fundamental mistakes/flaws in the existing description. The contributor is welcomed to add more items/terms.

The amount of work to cover most of this field is tremendous and definitely beyond the capability of a single person. It is also well understood that many textbooks use different symbols for many physics properties, such as dispersion (e.g. D_x v.s. η_x). I'll try to "unify" the notation and symbols across the whole scope of this Wikibook by defining a "convention". Please don't be worried if you see your contributions are edited just to follow the convention.

Introduction

Accelerator physics, or particle accelerator physics is a branch of applied physics, concerned with designing, building and operating particle accelerators. It involves the study of motion, control and measurement of relativistic charged particle beams and their interaction with accelerator elements by electromagnetic fields. Although the name implies that the particles are being accelerated, the topics in accelerator physics can also be the focusing/defocusing, steering, storing, detecting, and applications of a particle beam. It is also tightly collected with other fields, such as RF technology and engineering, nuclear physics, high energy physics, laser, medical physics, and computer science.

Most often accelerator physics is studied and used for a specific purpose, such as providing colliding beams, fixed-target experiment, creating synchrotron lights, cancer treatment, and so forth. The purposes guide researchers to come up with new ideas to improve the beam quality and design new facilities.

Contents

• Useful constants, formulas, and conventions
• History of accelerators and accelerator physics
• Physics of linear accelerators (Focusing on longitudinal dynamics)
• Physics of circular accelerators (Focusing on transverse dynamics)
• Wakefield accelerators
• Free Electron Laser (FEL)
• Collective instabilities, space-charge effect, electron cloud
• Other special topics

Editing guide

The first author kindly asks contributors to provide more physics explanations and only useful formulas in the main body of each entry. If you happen to know the detailed derivation, please provide a separate heading for that entry to include the full detailed derivation for each formula. This will help the readers to first think, and then get their hands dirty.