PARTICLE ACCELERATOR
A project report submitted to
Council for Indian School Certificate examination
IN
PHYSICS
By
Agney Reddy
(Roll Number: 03)
UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF
Dr. AJAYAKUMAR C. J
GREENWOOD HIGH
Bengaluru-560034
JANUARY 2020
1
CERTIFICATE
This is to certify that the project titled “Thermodynamics & Kinetic
Theory” submitted by Mr Agney Reddy to Council for Indian School
Certificate Examination, New Delhi in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the practical in Physics is a record of original work
carried out by her/him under my/our supervision. The content of this
report, in full or in parts, has not been submitted by any other candidate
to any other Institution.
(Signature)
Place:
Dr. Ajayakumar C.J Date:
Mr. Aloysius D’Mello
Principal
Greenwood high
Evaluator
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I, Agney Mahesh of class XII A, Greenwood High would like to
convey my gratitude to my principal, Mr. Aloysius D’Mello for giving
me the opportunity to do this project and gain vast knowledge on it
through research. I would like to thank my physics teacher, Dr.
Ajayakumar C.J for providing his support and guidance and clarifying
all our doubts with utter patience. I would also like to thank my parents
and friends for providing a helping hand and for also being a pillar of
support and guidance and providing what help they could during the
period of time given in submitting this project.
3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 5
2. HISTORY ............................................................................ 7
3. USES ................................................................................... 7
3.1 HIGH-ENERGY PHYSICS .......................................................... 7
3.2 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND ISOTOPE PRODUCTION .................................... 8
3.3 SYNCHROTRON RADIATION ........................................................... 10
3.3 LOW-ENERGY MACHINES AND PARTICLE THERAPY .............................. 10
4. ELECTROSTATIC PARTICLE ACCELERATORS ..................... 11
5. ELECTRODYNAMIC PARTICLE ACCELERATORS ................. 14
5.1 MAGNETIC INDUCTION ACCELERATORS ..................................... 14
5.2 LINEAR ACCELERATORS ........................................................ 19
5.3 CIRCULAR OR CYCLIC RF ACCELERATORS .................................. 24
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................. 29
4
1. Introduction
By definition, a particle accelerator is a machine that propels charged
particles to very high speeds and energies by using electromagnetic
fields.
These large particle accelerators are used for research in particle physics,
a rather modern branch of physics. The biggest accelerator currently is
the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) based in Geneva, Switzerland, built by
CERN. There are other powerful accelerators like the KEKB at KEK in
Japan, the Tevatron at Fermilab, Illinois, and RHIC at Brookhaven
National Laboratory. There are also many smaller particle accelerators.
They are used in particle therapy for oncological purposes, radioisotope
production for medical diagnostics, ion implanters for manufacture of
semiconductors, and accelerator mass spectrometers for measurements of
rare isotopes such as radiocarbon. There are currently around 40,000
accelerators in operation around the world.
5
History
Ernest Lawrence's first cyclotron was only 100 mm in diameter. Later, in
1939, he built a machine with a 60-inch diameter pole face, and planned
one with a 184-inch diameter in 1942, which was, however, taken over
for World War II-related work connected with uranium isotope
separation; after the war it continued in service for research and medicine
over many years.
The first large proton synchrotron was the Cosmotron at Brookhaven
National Laboratory, which accelerated protons to about 3 GeV (1953–
1968). The Bevatron at Berkeley, completed in 1954, was specifically
designed to accelerate protons to sufficient energy to create antiprotons,
and verify the particle-antiparticle symmetry of nature, then only
theorized. The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven
(1960–) was the first large synchrotron with alternating gradient, "strong
focusing" magnets, which greatly reduced the required aperture of the
beam, and correspondingly the size and cost of the bending magnets. The
Proton Synchrotron, built at CERN (1959–), was the first major European
particle accelerator and generally similar to the AGS.
The Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC, became operational in 1966,
accelerating electrons to 30 GeV in a 3 km long waveguide, buried in a
tunnel and powered by hundreds of large klystrons. It is still the largest
linear accelerator in existence, and has been upgraded with the addition of
storage rings and an electron-positron collider facility. It is also an X-ray
and UV synchrotron photon source.
The Fermilab Tevatron has a ring with a beam path of 4 miles (6.4 km). It
has received several upgrades, and has functioned as a proton-antiproton
collider until it was shut down due to budget cuts on September 30, 2011.
6
The largest circular accelerator ever built was the LEP synchrotron at
CERN with a circumference 26.6 kilometers, which was an
electron/positron collider. It achieved an energy of 209 GeV before it was
dismantled in 2000 so that the underground tunnel could be used for the
Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is a proton collider, and
currently the world's largest and highest-energy accelerator, achieving 6.5
TeV energy per beam (13 TeV in total).
The aborted Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have
had a circumference of 87 km. Construction was started in 1991, but
abandoned in 1993. Very large circular accelerators are invariably built in
underground tunnels a few metres wide to minimize the disruption and
cost of building such a structure on the surface, and to provide shielding
against intense secondary radiations that occur, which are extremely
penetrating at high energies.
Current accelerators such as the Spallation Neutron Source, incorporate
superconducting cryomodules. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and
Large Hadron Collider also make use of superconducting magnets and RF
cavity resonators to accelerate particles.
7
Classification
Accelerators are usually broken into two different classes: electrostatic
and electrodynamic (electromagnetic) accelerators. Electrostatic
accelerators use static electric fields to accelerate particles. The most
common types are the Cockcroft–Walton generator and the Van de Graaff
generator. A small-scale example of this class is the cathode ray tube in
an old box set television. Electrodynamic or electromagnetic
accelerators, on the other hand, utilize the changing of the
electromagnetic fields, either magnetic induction or oscillating radio
frequency fields, to accelerate particles. These were first developed in the
1920s, forming the basis for most modern particle accelerators.
Rolf Widerøe, Gustav Ising, Leó Szilárd, Max Steenbeck, and Ernest
Lawrence are considered pioneers of this field, conceiving and building
the first operational linear particle accelerator,[4] the betatron, and the
cyclotron.
Because colliders can give evidence of the structure of the subatomic
world, accelerators were commonly referred to as atom smashers in the
20th century.[5] Despite the fact that most accelerators (but not ion
facilities) actually propel subatomic particles, the term persists in popular
usage when referring to particle accelerators in general.
8
Uses
Beams of high-energy particles are useful for fundamental and applied
research in the sciences, and also in many technical and industrial fields
unrelated to fundamental research. It has been estimated that there are
approximately 40,000 accelerators worldwide. Of these, only about 1%
are research machines with energies above 1 GeV, while about 44% are
for radiotherapy, 41% for ion implantation, 9% for industrial processing
and research, and 4% for biomedical and other low-energy research.[9]
High-energy Physics
Isolated quarks are experimentally unavailable due to color confinement,
the simplest experiments involve the interactions of leptons with each
other and of leptons with nucleons, which are composed of quarks and
gluons. In order to study the collisions of quarks with each other,
scientists use the collisions of nucleons, which at high energy may be
usefully considered as essentially 2-body interactions of the quarks and
gluons of which they are composed.
Therefore, elementary particle physicists tend to use machines creating
beams of electrons, protons, positrons, and antiprotons, interacting with
each other or with the simplest nuclei (hydrogen) at the highest possible
energies.
The largest and highest energy particle accelerator used for elementary
particle physics is LHC.
9
Nuclear physics and isotope production
Nuclear physicists may use beams of bare atomic nuclei, stripped of
electrons, to investigate the structure, interactions, and properties of the
nuclei themselves, and of condensed matter at extremely high
temperatures and densities, such as what might have occurred in the first
moments of the Big Bang. These investigations often involve collisions
of heavy nuclei, like iron or gold, at high energies. The largest such
particle accelerator used for this is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
(RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Particle accelerators can also produce proton beams, which can produce
proton-rich medical or research isotopes. The particle accelerator used for
this is LANSCE at Los Alamos.
Synchrotron radiation
Electrons accelerated in the magnetic field causes the high energy
electrons to emit extremely bright beams of high energy photons via
synchrotron radiation in the continuous spectrum, which have numerous
uses in the study of atomic structure, chemistry, and biology. A large
number of synchrotron light sources exist worldwide. A few in the US are
SSRL and LCLS at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, APS at
Argonne National Laboratory, ALS at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, and NSLS at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The ESRF in Grenoble, France has been used to obtain 3-dimensional
images of insects trapped in amber.[13] Because of this, there is a great
demand for electron accelerators of moderate energy and high intensity.
10
Low-energy machines and particle therapy
Simple day to day uses of particle accelerators are cathode ray tubes
found in television sets and X-ray generators. These low-energy
accelerators use a single pair of electrodes with a DC voltage of a few
thousand volts between them. In an X-ray generator, the target is one of
the electrodes itself. A low-energy particle accelerator called an ion
implanter is used in the manufacture of integrated circuits.
At lower energies, beams of accelerated nuclei are also used for the
treatment of cancer.
11
Electrostatic particle accelerators
Fig.1 A Cockcroft-Walton generator
Fig.2 A 1960s single stage 2 MeV linear Van de Graaff accelerator
The first accelerators used simple technology of a single static high
voltage to accelerate charged particles. The charged particle was
accelerated through an evacuated tube with an electrode at either end,
with the static potential across it. Since the particle passed only once
through the potential difference, the output energy was limited to the
accelerating voltage of the machine. While this method is still popular
today, with the electrostatic accelerators greatly out-numbering any other
12
type, they are more suited to lower energy studies owing to the practical
voltage limit of about 1 MV for air insulated machines, or 30 MV when
the accelerator is operated in a tank of pressurized gas with high dielectric
strength. In a tandem accelerator the potential is used twice to accelerate
the particles, by reversing the charge of the particles while they are inside
the terminal. This is possible with the acceleration of atomic nuclei by
using anions (negatively charged ions), and then passing the beam
through a thin foil to strip electrons off the anions inside the high voltage
terminal, converting them to cations (positively charged ions), which are
accelerated again as they leave the terminal.
The two main types of electrostatic accelerator are the Cockcroft-Walton
accelerator, which uses a diode-capacitor voltage multiplier to produce
high voltage, and the Van de Graaff accelerator, which uses a moving
fabric belt to carry charge to the high voltage electrode.
Electrodynamic (electromagnetic) particle accelerators
In order to accelerate particles to higher energies, techniques involving
dynamic fields rather than static fields are used due to the high voltage
imposed by electrical discharge. Electrodynamic acceleration can arise
from either of two mechanisms: non-resonant magnetic induction, or
resonant circuits or cavities excited by oscillating RF fields. [14]
Electrodynamic accelerators can be linear, with particles accelerating in a
straight line, or circular, using magnetic fields to bend particles in a
roughly circular orbit.
13
Magnetic induction accelerators
Magnetic induction accelerators accelerate particles by induction from an
increasing magnetic field. The increasing magnetic field creates a
circulating electric field which can be configured to accelerate the
particles. Induction accelerators can be either linear or circular.
Linear induction accelerators
Linear induction accelerators utilize ferrite-loaded, non-resonant
induction cavities. Each cavity can be thought of as two large washer-
shaped disks connected by an outer cylindrical tube. Between the disks is
a ferrite toroid. A voltage pulse applied between the two disks causes an
increasing magnetic field which inductively couples power into the
charged particle beam.[15]
The linear induction accelerator was invented by Christofilos in the
1960s.[16] Linear induction accelerators are capable of accelerating very
high beam currents in a single short pulse. They have been used to
generate X-rays for flash radiography, and have been considered as
particle injectors for magnetic confinement fusion and as drivers for free
electron lasers.
Betatrons
The Betatron is circular magnetic induction accelerator, invented by
Donald Kerst in 1940 for accelerating electrons. The concept originates
ultimately from Norwegian-German scientist Rolf Widerøe. These
machines use a donut-shaped ring magnet with a cyclically increasing B
field, but accelerate the particles by induction from the increasing
14
magnetic field, as if they were the secondary winding in a transformer,
due to the changing magnetic flux through the orbit.[17][18]
Linear accelerators
15
Fig.3 Modern superconducting radio frequency
In a linear particle accelerator (linac), particles are accelerated in a
straight line with a target of interest at one end. They are often used to
provide an initial low-energy boost to the particles before they are
injected into circular accelerators. The longest linac in the world is the
Stanford Linear Accelerator, SLAC, which is 3 km long. SLAC is an
electron-positron collider.
Linear high-energy accelerators use a linear array of plates where an
alternating high-energy field is applied. As the particles approach a plate
they are accelerated towards it by an opposite polarity charge applied to
the plate. As they pass through a hole in the plate, the polarity is switched
so that the plate now repels them and they are now accelerated by it
towards the next plate. Normally a stream of bunches of particles are
accelerated, so a carefully controlled AC voltage is applied to each plate
to continuously repeat this process for each bunch.
As the particles approach the speed of light the switching rate of the
electric fields becomes so high that they operate at radio frequencies, and
so microwave cavities are used in higher energy machines instead of
simple plates.
Linear accelerators are also widely used in medicine, for radiotherapy and
radiosurgery. The reliability, flexibility and accuracy of the radiation
beam produced has largely supplanted the older use of cobalt-60 therapy
as a treatment tool.
16
Circular or cyclic RF accelerators
In the circular accelerator, particles move in a circle until they reach
sufficient energy. The particle track is typically bent into a circle using
electromagnets. The advantage of circular accelerators is that the ring
structure allows continuous acceleration. Another advantage is that a
circular accelerator is smaller than a linear accelerator of comparable
power.
When any charged particle is accelerated, it emits electromagnetic
radiation and secondary emissions. As a particle traveling in a circle is
always accelerating towards the center of the circle, it continuously
radiates towards the tangent of the circle. This radiation is called
synchrotron light and depends on the mass of the accelerating particle.
For this reason, many high energy electron accelerators are linacs.
Since the special theory of relativity requires that matter always travels
slower than the speed of light in a vacuum, in high-energy accelerators, as
the energy increases the particle speed approaches the speed of light as a
limit, but never attains it. Therefore, particle physicists do not generally
think in terms of speed, but rather in terms of a particle's energy or
momentum, usually measured in electron volts.
Cyclotrons
17
Fig.4 Lawrence's 60 inch cyclotron
The earliest operational circular accelerators were cyclotrons, invented in
1929 by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley.
Cyclotrons have a single pair of hollow 'D'-shaped plates to accelerate the
particles and a single large dipole magnet to bend their path into a
circular orbit. The accelerating D's of a cyclotron can be driven at a
constant frequency by a radio frequency (RF) accelerating power source,
as the beam spirals outwards continuously. The particles are injected in
the center of the magnet and are extracted at the outer edge at their
maximum energy.
Cyclotrons reach an energy limit because of relativistic effects where the
particles effectively become really massive making the cyclotron
frequency drops out of synch with the accelerating RF. Therefore, simple
cyclotrons can accelerate protons only to an energy of around 15 million
electron volts because the protons get out of phase with the driving
electric field. If accelerated further, the beam would continue to spiral
outward to a larger radius but the particles would no longer gain enough
speed to complete the larger circle in step with the accelerating RF. To
accommodate relativistic effects the magnetic field needs to be increased
to higher radii as is done in isochronous cyclotrons. An example of an
isochronous cyclotron is the PSI Ring cyclotron in Switzerland, which
provides protons approximately 80% of the speed of light..
18
Synchrotrons
Fig.5 Aerial photo of the Tevatron at Fermilab
To reach still higher energies, with relativistic mass approaching or
exceeding the rest mass of the particles it is necessary to use a
synchrotron. This is an accelerator in which the particles are accelerated
in a ring of constant radius. The advantage here is that the magnetic field
need only be present over the actual region of the particle orbits, which is
much narrower than that of the ring.
However, since the particle momentum increases during acceleration, it is
necessary to turn up the magnetic field B in proportion to maintain
constant curvature of the orbit. In consequence, synchrotrons cannot
accelerate particles continuously, as cyclotrons can, but must operate
cyclically, supplying particles in bunches, which are delivered to a target
or an external beam in beam spills every few seconds.
In modern synchrotrons, the beam aperture is small and the magnetic
field does not cover the entire area of the particle orbit as it does for a
cyclotron, so several necessary functions can be separated. Instead of one
huge magnet, one has a line of hundreds of bending magnets, enclosed by
vacuum connecting pipes.[19][20][21] The focusing of the beam is handled
independently by specialized quadrupole magnets, while the acceleration
19
itself is accomplished in separate RF sections, rather similar to short
linear accelerators.[22]
More complex modern synchrotrons such as the Tevatron, LEP, and LHC
may deliver the particle bunches into storage rings of magnets with a
constant magnetic field, where they can continue to orbit for long periods
for experimentation or further acceleration. The highest-energy machines
such as the Tevatron and LHC are actually accelerator complexes, with a
cascade of specialized elements in series, including linear accelerators for
initial beam creation, one or more low energy synchrotrons to reach
intermediate energy, storage rings where beams can be accumulated or
cooled, and a last large ring for final acceleration and experimentation.
Synchrotron radiation sources
Some circular accelerators have been built to deliberately generate
radiation (called synchrotron light) as X-rays also called synchrotron
radiation, for example the Diamond Light Source which has been built at
the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England or the Advanced Photon
Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, USA. High-energy X-
rays are useful for X-ray spectroscopy of proteins or X-ray absorption
fine structure (XAFS), for example.
20
Fixed-Field Alternating Gradient
Accelerators
Fixed-Field Alternating Gradient accelerators (FFA)s, in which a
magnetic field which is fixed in time, but with a radial variation to
achieve strong focusing, allows the beam to be accelerated with a high
repetition rate but in a much smaller radial spread than in the cyclotron
case. Isochronous FFAs, like isochronous cyclotrons, achieve continuous
beam operation, but without the need for a huge dipole bending magnet
covering the entire radius of the orbits.[23]
21
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Online Resources
[1] [Link]
[Link]
[2] [Link]
[3] [Link]
[4] K. Wille, The Physics of Particle Accelerators
[5] R.J. Van de Graaff, Phys.
[6] P.J. Bryant, in Proceedings of the CAS-CERN Accelerator
[Link]
[7] HERA Design Team, HERA: a proposal for a large electron
proton colliding beam facility at DESY
[8] [Link]
[9] [Link]
[10][Link],Challengesforhighestenergycircularcolliders,in
[11] [Link]
[12] [Link] [14] A.
Cho, Science 337(2012) 141.
[Link]
Books:
NCERT Physics Class XII (Vol I)
22