What is it about?
Linear accelerators (linacs) are used to accelerate charged particle beams to velocities up to a few percent of the speed of light. These have many applciations, including sample sterilization, induction of nuclear reactions in a target material, and various nuclear physics studies of radioactive isotopes and their reactions. Variable energy operation requires changing of the accelerator's radiofrequency voltage and phase (timing). Since no closed-form expression exists to compute these parameters, we propose a new method to predictively set the linac's parameters, for any desired output beam energy.
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Why is it important?
Our proposed method for fast optimization of RF parameters enables rapid linac energy changes, which reduces the complexity of machine operation.
Perspectives
This article spent a few years as a working paper; it stemmed from a lunchtime discussion, pre-COVID and pre-hybrid/remote working, back when we were in the lab and had lunch together every day. We explored the differences between two-gap RF cavities and fifteen-gap cavities, which behave differently. I visited the team in Frankfurt in January 2020, just before lockdown. I didn't anticipate that this would be my last record from the before times.
Olivier Shelbaya
TRIUMF
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Tuning methods for multigap drift tube linacs, Review of Scientific Instruments, March 2024, American Institute of Physics,
DOI: 10.1063/5.0191603.
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