As the particles in a synchrotron are accelerated, the strength of the magnetic field is increased to keep the radius of the orbit approximately constant. This technique has the advantage that the magnet required for forming the particle orbits is much smaller than that needed in a cyclotron to produce the same particle energies. The acceleration is effected by radio-frequency voltages, while the synchronism is maintained by the principle of phase stability. The rate of increase of the energy of the particles is set by the rate of increase of the magnetic field strength. The peak accelerating voltage is ordinarily about twice as large as the average energy gain per turn would require, to provide the margin for phase stability. Particles can be stably accelerated with a range of energies and phases with respect to the accelerating voltage, and very intense beams can be produced.
The magnetic field must be shaped so as to focus the beam of particles. In early synchrotrons the field was caused to decrease slightly with increasing radius, as in a betatron. This arrangement resulted in a weak focusing effect that was adequate for machines in which the dimensions of the magnet gap could be appreciable in comparison with the radius of the orbit. The magnitude of the magnetic fields that may be used is limited by the saturation of the iron components that shape the field and provide a path for the magnetic flux. Therefore, if the energy of accelerators is to be increased, their radius must be increased correspondingly. For relativistic particles the radius is proportional to the kinetic energy. The magnet of a synchrotron with weak focusing, designed to have a reasonable intensity, would have a mass proportional to the cube of the radius. It is clear that increasing the energy beyond some point—in practice, about 10 GeV—would be very expensive.
The introduction of alternating-gradient focusing provided the solution to this problem and made possible the development of synchrotrons with much higher energies. The idea was promptly incorporated in the design of the 33-GeV proton synchrotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and the 28-GeV machine at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), near Geneva.
The magnetic fields in an alternating-gradient synchrotron vary much more strongly with radius than those used for weak focusing. A magnet with pole-tips shaped as shown in cross section ab in the produces a magnetic field that sharply decreases with increasing radius. To the particle beam, this magnetic field acts like a lens with a very short focal length. In the vertical direction (the orbital plane is horizontal) it focuses the beam, but in the radial direction it is almost equally defocusing. A magnet with the pole-tip shapes shown in cross section cd in the figure produces a field that strongly increases with increasing radius. This field is defocusing in the vertical direction and focusing in the radial direction. Although pairing such magnetic fields results in partial cancellation, the overall effect is to provide focusing in both directions. The ring of magnetic field is created by a large number of magnets, with the two types of pole-tips alternating, as shown at the top of the figure. The beam, in effect, passes through a succession of lenses as the particles move around the ring, producing a large beam current in a vacuum chamber of small cross section.
Particles accelerated in a large synchrotron are commonly injected by a linear accelerator and are steered into the ring by a device called an inflector. They begin their acceleration in the ring when the magnetic field is small. As the field created by the ring magnets increases, the injection pulse is timed so that the field and the energy of the particles from the linear accelerator are properly matched. The radio-frequency accelerating devices, usually called cavities, operate on the same principle as a short section of a linear accelerator. The useful beam may be either the accelerated particles that have been extracted from the ring by special magnets or secondary particles ejected from a target that is introduced into the beam.
Electron synchrotrons
The invention of the synchrotron immediately solved the problem of the limit on the acceleration of electrons that had been imposed by the radiation of electrons moving in circular orbits. This radiation has been named synchrotron radiation because it was first observed during the operation of a 70-MeV electron synchrotron built at the General Electric Company Research and Development Center laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. A betatron can accelerate electrons to 300 MeV only if the radiation is carefully compensated, but a synchrotron needs only a modest increase in the radio-frequency accelerating voltage. As the particles lose energy by radiation, their average phase with respect to the accelerating voltage simply shifts slightly so as to increase their average energy gain per revolution.
Electron synchrotrons with energies near 300 MeV have been constructed in several countries, the first being the one built in 1949 at Berkeley under Edwin McMillan’s direction. In these accelerators the electrons were injected by a pulsed electron gun, and the initial acceleration from 50–100 keV to 2–3 MeV was induced as in a betatron. The magnets were specifically designed to provide the accelerating flux in the initial part of the magnet cycle; during this time the speed of the electrons increased from about 50 percent of the speed of light to more than 95 percent. At this point, acceleration by the radio-frequency cavity supervened, and the small further change in speed was accommodated by a 5 percent change in the radius of the orbit.
Strong focusing was first applied to the electron synchrotron in the 1.2-GeV device built in 1954 at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. All large electron synchrotrons now are equipped with linear accelerators as injectors. The practical limit on the energy of an electron synchrotron is set by the cost of the radio-frequency system needed to restore the energy the electrons lose by radiation. To minimize this energy loss, the acceleration time is made as short as possible (a few milliseconds), and the magnetic fields are kept weak. The weak fields keep down the energy loss by guiding the electrons on gently curved paths. However, because synchrotron radiation losses increase as the fourth power of the energy, small increases in energy lead to large increases in radius.
The largest electron synchrotrons, used in particle physics research, operate as colliding-beam storage rings (see below Colliding-beam storage rings). At CERN the Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider was designed to accelerate electrons and positrons initially to 50 GeV and later to about 100 GeV in a ring with a circumference of 27 km (17 miles). This is probably the practical limit for such machines.
Another way to reduce the energy used in an electron synchrotron is to employ superconducting radio-frequency accelerating cavities. These have no electrical resistance and hence much lower losses due to current heating effects. They are used, for example, to accelerate electrons in the 6.3-km (3.9-mile) ring of the electron-proton collider at the DESY (German Electron Synchrotron) laboratory in Hamburg, Ger. (see below Colliding-beam storage rings: Electron-proton storage rings). Superconducting cavities were also used to double the energy of the beams in LEP from 50 GeV per beam with copper cavities to a little over 100 GeV with superconducting cavities.
Proton synchrotrons
The mode of operation of a proton synchrotron is very similar to that of an electron synchrotron, but there are two important differences. First, because the speed of a proton does not approach the speed of light until its energy is well above 1 GeV, the frequency of the accelerating voltage must be modulated to keep it proportional to the speed of the particle during the initial stage of the acceleration. Second, protons do not lose a significant amount of energy by radiation at energies attainable by present-day techniques. The limit on the energy of a proton synchrotron is therefore set by the cost of the magnet ring, which increases only as the first power of the energy or even more slowly. The highest-energy particle accelerators yet built are proton synchrotrons.
The first proton synchrotron to operate (1952) was the 3-GeV Cosmotron at Brookhaven. It, and other accelerators that soon followed, had weakly focusing magnets. The 28-GeV proton synchrotron at CERN and the 33-GeV machine at Brookhaven made use of the principle of alternating-gradient focusing, but not without complications. Such focusing is so strong that the time required for a particle to complete one orbit does not depend strongly on the energy of the particle. Therefore, for the energy range (which may extend to several GeV) within which acceleration appreciably affects the speed of the particle, phase stability operates as it does in a linear accelerator: the region of stable phase is on the rising side of the time curve of the accelerating voltage. At higher energies, however, the speed of the proton is substantially constant, and the region of stable phase is on the falling side of the voltage curve, as it is in a synchrocyclotron. At the point that divides these regions, called the transition energy, there is no phase stability. At Brookhaven a model electron accelerator was built to demonstrate that the beam could be accelerated through the transition energy in a stable manner.
In 1972 a large proton synchrotron went into operation at Fermilab. This machine had a magnet ring occupying a circular tunnel 6.3 km (3.9 miles) in circumference. At first it accelerated protons to 200 GeV, but by 1976 it had reached 500 GeV. In the same year, a similar accelerator, the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), began operation at CERN. The SPS was fed protons by the 28-GeV proton synchrotron (PS) and accelerated them to 400 GeV, reaching 450 GeV at a later date.
To reach still higher energies, Fermilab built a second synchrotron in the 6.3-km tunnel. The Tevatron was designed to operate at nearly 1,000 GeV, or 1 TeV, the energy that gives the device its name. The intense magnetic fields needed to guide and focus such an energetic proton beam were provided by 1,000 magnets with windings made of a superconducting alloy, and the whole ring was kept at 4.5 kelvins by liquid helium. The original synchrotron at Fermilab, based on conventional magnets, served as injector for the Tevatron until 1997. In 1999 the Main Injector, a new synchrotron with a 3.3-km (2.1-mile) magnet ring, replaced the earlier machine to provide a more-intense beam for the Tevatron.
At Fermilab the proton beam, initially in the guise of negative hydrogen ions (each a single proton with two electrons), originated in a 750-kV Cockcroft-Walton generator and was accelerated to 400 MeV in a linear accelerator. A carbon foil then stripped the electrons from the ions, and the protons were injected into the Booster, a small synchrotron 150 metres (500 feet) in diameter, which accelerated the particles to 8 GeV. From the Booster the protons were transferred to the Main Injector, where they were further accelerated to 150 GeV before being fed to the final stage of acceleration in the Tevatron.
Until 2000, protons at 800 GeV were extracted from the Tevatron and directed onto targets to yield a variety of particle beams for different experiments. The Main Injector then became the principal machine for providing extracted beams, at the lower energy of 120 GeV but at much higher intensities than the Tevatron provided. In 1987 the Tevatron began to operate as a proton-antiproton collider, and this was its sole function from 2000 until it closed in 2011.
The SPS at CERN has also operated as proton-antiproton collider and has accelerated heavy ions (such as sulfur and lead ions), as well as electrons and positrons, for injection into the LEP collider. Together with the smaller PS, it continues to form part of CERN’s integrated complex of accelerators.