🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <70425@ut-emx.uucp>, johncobb@ut-emx.cc.utexas.edu (John W. Cobb) writes:
> In article <1992Apr14.213121.17723@lmpsbbs.mot.com>,
> capurka@ssd.comm.mot.com (Tom Capurka) writes:
> |>Hello,
> |>I have a question about particle accelerators:  Why does there seem to be
> |>a terminal particle energy for a given particle, accelerator, related to
> |>the radius of the acclerator?  Is this because the radiation caused by...
> 
> Well, you coudn't put a colliding ring w/ SSC type energies into a box
> with getting a great deal of radiation. So the competing effect you
> describe above would be imensely increased...
> 
> You might think of some other tricks also. The two big problems you need to
> finesse are 1) a collider must reduce (or re-absorb?) its own radiation...

Just to reiterate a point I made earlier, the limitation for an SSC-type
machine is NOT the radiation, but the magnetic field used to constrain the beam
into a circle. The magnetic field required to collapse a 20TeV ring to the size
of a meter radius, whether it's electrons or protons or Buicks (the latter
suffering almost no synchrotron radiation at all), would be 60,000 Tesla!

Now in fact, for the SSC, the energies of the proton are high enough that
synchrotron energy losses are not completely ignorable (left as an exercise),
and this is why the magnets are not absolutely the strongest available...i.e.
the ring as designed was allowed to expand a little to lessen the losses due to
radiation. But believe me, the magnets will run out of steam long before you
ever worry about vaporizing the beam tube walls with gamma rays.

Paul Draper
University of Texas at Arlington
draper@sscvx1.ssc.gov
Mythink. Not UTAthink, not SSCthink, not GOVthink. Happy now?