A Cost-Effective Rapid-Cycling Synchrotron

The present Fermilab proton Booster is an early example of a rapidly-cycling synchrotron (RCS). Built in the 1960s, it features a design in which the combined-function dipole magnets serve as vacuum chambers. Such a design is quite cost-effective, and it does not have the limitations associated with the eddy currents in a metallic vacuum chamber. However, an important drawback of that design is a high impedance, as seen by a beam, because of the magnet laminations. More recent RCS designs (e.g. J-PARC) employ large and complex ceramic vacuum chambers in order to mitigate the eddy current effects and to shield the beam from the magnet laminations. Such a design, albeit very successful, is quite costly because it requires large-bore magnets and large-bore RF cavities. In this article, we will consider an RCS concept with a thin-wall metallic vacuum chamber as a compromise between the chamber-less Fermilab Booster design and the large-bore design with ceramic chambers.

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