Beam energy reduction in an acceleration gap

The subject of high-current accelerators has recently attracted considerable attention. The high-current beam accompanies a substantial amount of field energy in the space between the beam and the drift tube wall, as it propagates through a conducting drift tube of accelerator system. While such a beam is being accelerated in a gap, this field energy is subject to leak through the opening of the gap. The amount of energy lost in the gap is replenished by the beam at the expense of its kinetic energy. In this paper, the authors present a simple analysis of field energy loss in an acceleration gap for a relativistic beam for which beam particle velocity equals to c. It is found that the energy loss, which in turn reduces the beam kinetic energy, is ΔV = IZ0: the beam current times the characteristic impedance of the acceleration gap. As a result, the apparent acceleration voltage of the gap is reduced from the applied voltage by ΔV. This effect, especially for generation of high-current beam accelerated by a multigap accelerator, appears to be an important design consideration. The energy reduction mechanism and a few examples are presented