RF linac designs with beams in thermal equilibrium

Abstract

Beams in conventional radio‐frequency linear accelerators (rf linacs) usually have a transverse temperature which is much larger than the longitudinal temperature. With high currents, space charge forces couple the transverse and longitudinal particle motions, driving the beam toward thermal equilibrium, which leads to emittance growth and halo formation. A design strategy is proposed in which the beam has equal transverse and longitudinal temperatures through the entire linac, avoiding these undesirable effects. For such equipartitioned linac beams, simple analytical relationships can be derived for the bunch size, tune depression, and other parameters as a function of beam intensity, emittance, and external focusing. These relations were used to develop three conceptual designs for a 938 MeV, 100 mA proton linac with different tune depressions, which are presented in this paper.