Ring accelerator
Ring accelerators or circular accelerators (also circular accelerators ) are particle accelerators in which the charged particles, in contrast to direct voltage and linear accelerators , repeatedly run through a more or less "round" - for example approximately spiral or circular - path. A more accurate but rare term is circulation accelerator .
The advantage is that the particles use the same acceleration distances over and over again; a circular accelerator is more economical and, for high final energies, more space-saving than a comparable linear accelerator. The disadvantage is that the particles emit synchrotron radiation at a sufficiently high speed because of the necessary deflection and thus lose energy.
Types
An important design is the synchrotron , in which the magnetic flux density of the deflecting dipole magnets is increased proportionally to the increasing particle momentum, which results in a constant radius of the orbit. The storage ring , in which the accelerated particles rotate with constant energy , has a similar structure, but not a particle accelerator in the strict sense .
The cyclotron , microtron , betatron and rhodotron also belong to the ring accelerators .
literature
- Hanno Krieger: Radiation sources for technology and medicine . Teubner Verlag 2005, ISBN 3-8351-0019-X .