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Radiation in particle accelerators

Physics Asked by user280583 on May 11, 2021

I was reading about particle accelerators in Wikipedia and I came across this.

Depending on the energy and the particle being accelerated, circular accelerators suffer a disadvantage in that the particles emit synchrotron radiation.

Why don’t linear accelerators have this disadvantage. The particle is accelerated in both the cases right?

One Answer

Larmor's formula for total synchrotron power is:

$$ P = frac{q^2}{6piepsilon_0 c}gamma^6big[|dot{vec beta}|^2-|{vec beta}timesdot{vec beta}|^2big]$$

which is easily separated into longitudinal and transverse components.

But the real issue is that in a LINAC, the electron passes through the accelerator (like SLAC) once in 1 microsecond and then hits the target/beam dump. Meanwhile, and electron at LEP goes around more than 11,000 times per second and is continually loosing energy.

At DESY, the positron beam lifetime was on the order of 8 hours (last time I was there), so the energy lost to synchrotron radiation is significant.

Correct answer by JEB on May 11, 2021

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