EMMA -the Electron Model of Many Applicationsis to be built at the STFC Daresbury Laboratory in the UK and will be the first non-scaling FFAG ever constructed. EMMA will be used to demonstrate the principle of this type of accelerator and study its features in detail. The design of the machine and its hardware components are now far advanced and construction is due for completion in Autumn 2009.
This article describes particle accelerators using magnets whose field strengths are fixed in time to steer and focus ion beams in a spiral orbit so that they pass between (and can be accelerated by) the same electrodes many times. The first example of such a device, Lawrence's cyclotron, revolutionized nuclear physics in the 1930s, but was limited in energy by relativistic effects. To overcome these limits two approaches were taken, enabling energies of many hundreds of MeV/u to be reached: either frequency-modulating the rf accelerating field (the synchrocyclotron) or introducing an azimuthal variation in the magnetic field (the isochronous or sector-focused cyclotron). Both techniques are applied in fixed-field alternating-gradient accelerators (FFAGs), which were intensively studied in the 1950s and '60s with electron models. Technological advances have made possible the recent construction of several proton FFAGs, and a wide variety of designs is being studied for diverse applications with electrons, muons, protons and heavier ions. All fixed-field accelerators offer high beam intensity: classical and isochronous cyclotrons operate in cw mode and in some cases deliver beams of 2 mA; synchrocyclotrons and most FFAGs operate in pulsed mode, but are capable of much higher pulse repetition rates (≤ kHz) than synchrotrons.
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