How to build safe particle colliders that are unaffected by electromagnetic forces

Washington, October 6 (ANI): In a new research, a scientist is working towards controlling huge electromagnetic forces that have the potential to destroy the next generation of particle accelerators.

Professor Roger Jones, a University of Manchester physicist, is carrying out the research.

So-called 'wake fields' occur during the process of acceleration and can cause particles to fly apart.

The particles are travelling at extremely high energies - and if they are subjected to these wake fields, they can easily destroy the accelerators.

In his research paper 'Wake field Suppression in High Gradient Linacs for Lepton Linear Colliders', accelerator physicist Professor Roger Jones examines research into the suppression of these wake fields.

According to Jones, the challenge is finding a way to suppress wake fields sufficiently while still maintaining a high acceleration field to perform particle collisions.

"Wake fields have been carefully controlled and suppressed in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. However, physicists are now looking at what comes after the LHC," Prof Jones said.

"An electron-positron collider is the natural successor to the LHC and it turns out the wake fields are much more severe in these linear collider machines," he added.

"Indeed, acceleration of particles to ultra-relativistic energies over several tens of kilometres in the proposed Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), for example, poses several significant accelerator physics challenges to designers of these immense machines," he said.

"Beams consisting of several hundred bunches of tightly focussed charged particles can readily excite intense wake fields, forcing the bunches to fly apart," he added.

In his conclusions, Prof Jones suggests two approaches to mitigate for the effects of these extreme wake fields.

One approach entails heavy damping, in which the majority of the wake field is sucked out of the collider by structures, known as waveguides, coupled to each cell in the accelerator.

A second approach entails light damping - in which a small portion is removed - in combination with detuning the cell frequencies of the accelerator.

"Detuning is perhaps more elegant than heavy damping as it also enables the position of the beam to be determined by the quantity of wake fields radiated by the beam - in this way a DDS accelerator removes the wake fields and has its own built-in diagnostic," said Prof Jones. (ANI)