Linear particle accelerator

A linear particle accelerator (often shortened to linac) is a type of particle accelerator that accelerates charged subatomic particles or ions to a high speed by subjecting them to a series of oscillating electric potentials along a linear beamline. The principles for such machines were proposed by Gustav Ising in 1924, while the first machine that worked was constructed by Rolf Widerøe in 1928 at the RWTH Aachen University.
Linacs have many applications: they generate X-rays and high energy electrons for medicinal purposes in radiation therapy, serve as particle injectors for higher-energy accelerators, and are used directly to achieve the highest kinetic energy for light particles (electrons and positrons) for particle physics.
The design of a linac depends on the type of particle that is being accelerated: electrons, protons or ions. Linacs range in size from a cathode ray tube (which is a type of linac) to the linac at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California.
Construction and operation.
See animated diagram. A linear particle accelerator consists of the following parts:
As shown in the animation, the oscillating voltage applied to alternate cylindrical electrodes has opposite polarity (180° out of phase), so adjacent electrodes have opposite voltages. This creates an oscillating electric field "(E)" in the gap between each pair of electrodes, which exerts force on the particles when they pass through, imparting energy to them by accelerating them. The particle source injects a group of particles into the first electrode once each cycle of the voltage, when the charge on the electrode is opposite to the charge on the particles. The electrodes are made the correct length so that the accelerating particles take exactly one-half cycle to pass through each electrode. Each time the particle bunch passes through an electrode, the oscillating voltage changes polarity, so when the particles reach the gap between electrodes the electric field is in the correct direction to accelerate them. Therefore, the particles accelerate to a faster speed each time they pass between electrodes; there is little electric field inside the electrodes so the particles travel at a constant speed within each electrode.
The particles are injected at the right time so that the oscillating voltage differential between electrodes is maximum as the particles cross each gap. If the peak voltage applied between the electrodes is formula_1 volts, and the charge on each particle is formula_2 elementary charges, the particle gains an equal increment of energy of formula_3 electron volts when passing through each gap. Thus the output energy of the particles is 
electron volts, where formula_5 is the number of accelerating electrodes in the machine. 
At speeds near the speed of light, the incremental velocity increase will be small, with the energy appearing as an increase in the mass of the particles. In portions of the accelerator where this occurs, the tubular electrode lengths will be almost constant. Additional magnetic or electrostatic lens elements may be included to ensure that the beam remains in the center of the pipe and its electrodes. Very long accelerators may maintain a precise alignment of their components through the use of servo systems guided by a laser beam.
Concepts in development.
Various new concepts are currently (2021) in development. The primary goal is to make linear accelerators cheaper, with better focused beams, higher energy or higher beam current.
Induction linear accelerator.
Induction linear accelerators use the electric field induced by a time-varying magnetic field for acceleration - like the betatron. The particle beam passes through a series of ring-shaped ferrite cores standing one behind the other, which are magnetized by high-current pulses and in turn each generate an electrical field strength pulse along the axis of the beam direction. Induction linear accelerators are considered for short high current pulses from electrons, but also from heavy ions. The concept goes back to the work of Nicholas Christofilos. Its realization is highly dependent on progress in the development of more suitable Ferrite materials. With electrons, pulse currents of up to 5 kiloamps at energies up to 5 MeV and pulse durations in the range of 20 to 300 nanoseconds were achieved.
Energy Recovery LINAC.
In previous electron linear accelerators, the accelerated particles are used only once and then fed into an absorber "(beam dump)", in which their residual energy is converted into heat. In an "Energy Recovery Linac" (ERL; literally: "Energy recovery linear accelerator"), instead, the accelerated in resonators and, for example, in undulators. The electrons used are fed back through the accelerator, out of phase by 180 degrees. They therefore pass through the resonators in the decelerating phase and thus return their remaining energy to the field. The concept is comparable to the hybrid drive of motor vehicles, where the kinetic energy released during braking is made available for the next acceleration by charging a battery.
The Brookhaven National Laboratory  and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin with the project "bERLinPro"  reported on corresponding development work . The Berlin experimental accelerator uses superconducting niobium cavity resonators of the type mentioned above. In 2014, three free-electron lasers based on "Energy Recovery Linacs were" in operation "worldwide" : in the Jefferson Lab (USA), in the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics (Russia) and at JAEA (Japan).  At the University of Mainz , an ERL called MESA is under construction and should (as of 2019) go into operation in 2022.
Compact Linear Collider.
The concept of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) (original name "CERN Linear Collider" , with the same abbreviation) for electrons and positrons provides a traveling wave accelerator for energies of the order of 1 tera-electron volt (TeV). Instead of the otherwise necessary numerous klystron amplifiers to generate the acceleration power, a second, parallel electron linear accelerator of lower energy is to be used, which works with superconducting cavities in which standing waves are formed. High-frequency power is extracted from it at regular intervals and transmitted to the main accelerator. In this way, the very high acceleration field strength of 80 MV / m should be achieved.
Kielfeld accelerator (plasma accelerator).
In cavity resonators, the dielectric strength limits the maximum acceleration that can be achieved within a certain distance. This limit can be circumvented using accelerated waves in plasma to generate the accelerating field in Kielfeld accelerators: A laser or particle beam excites an oscillation in a plasma, which is associated with very strong electric field strengths. This means that significantly (factors of 100s to 1000s ) more compact linear accelerators can possibly be built. Experiments involving high power lasers in metal vapour plasmas suggest that a beam line length reduction from some tens of metres to a few cm is quite possible.
Compact Medical Accelerators.
The LIGHT program (Linac for Image-Guided Hadron Therapy) hopes to create a design capable of accelerating protons to 200MeV or so for medical use over a distance of a few tens of metres, by optimising and nesting existing accelerator techniques The current design (2020) uses the highest practical bunch frequency (currently ~ 3GHz) for a Radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) stage from injection at 50kVdC to ~5MeV bunches, a Side Coupled Drift Tube Linac (SCDTL) to accelerate from 5Mev to ~ 40MeV and a Cell Coupled Linac (CCL) stage final, taking the output to 200-230MeV. Each stage is optimised to allow close coupling and synchronous operation during the beam energy build-up.
The project aim is to make proton therapy a more accessible mainstream medicine as an alternative to existing radio therapy.
Modern linear accelerator concepts.
The higher the frequency of the acceleration voltage selected, the more individual acceleration thrusts per path length a particle of a given speed experiences, and the shorter the accelerator can therefore be overall. That is why accelerator technology developed in the pursuit of higher particle energies, especially towards higher frequencies.
The linear accelerator concepts (often called accelerator structures in technical terms) that have been used since around 1950 work with frequencies in the range from around 100 megahertz (MHz) to a few gigahertz (GHz) and use the electric field component of electromagnetic waves.
Standing waves and traveling waves.
When it comes to energies of more than a few MeV, accelerators for ions are different from those for electrons. The reason for this is the large mass difference between the particles. Electrons are already close to the speed of light, the absolute speed limit, at a few MeV; with further acceleration, as described by relativistic mechanics, almost only their energy and momentum increase. On the other hand, with ions of this energy range, the speed also increases significantly due to further acceleration.
The acceleration concepts used today for "ions" are always based on electromagnetic standing waves that are formed in suitable resonators. Depending on the type of particle, energy range and other parameters, very different types of resonators are used; the following sections only cover some of them. "Electrons" can also be accelerated with standing waves above a few MeV. An advantageous alternative here, however, is a progressive wave, a traveling wave. The phase velocity the traveling wave must be roughly equal to the particle speed. Therefore, this technique is only suitable when the particles are almost at the speed of light, so that their speed only increases very little.
The development of high-frequency oscillators and power amplifiers from the 1940s, especially the klystron, was essential for these two acceleration techniques . The first larger linear accelerator with standing waves - for protons - was built in 1945/46 in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory under the direction of Luis W. Alvarez. The frequency used was 200 MHz.  The first electron accelerator with traveling waves of around 2 GHz (gigahertz) was developed a little later at Stanford University by W.W. Hansen and colleagues. 
In the two diagrams, the curve and arrows indicate the force acting on the particles. Only at the points with the correct direction of the electric field vector, i.e. the correct direction of force, can particles absorb energy from the wave. (An increase in speed cannot be seen in the scale of these images.)
Advantages.
The linear accelerator could produce higher particle energies than the previous electrostatic particle accelerators (the Cockcroft-Walton accelerator and Van de Graaff generator) that were in use when it was invented. In these machines, the particles were only accelerated once by the applied voltage, so the particle energy in electron volts was equal to the accelerating voltage on the machine, which was limited to a few million volts by insulation breakdown. In the linac, the particles are accelerated multiple times by the applied voltage, so the particle energy is not limited by the accelerating voltage.
High power linacs are also being developed for production of electrons at relativistic speeds, required since fast electrons traveling in an arc will lose energy through synchrotron radiation; this limits the maximum power that can be imparted to electrons in a synchrotron of given size.
Linacs are also capable of prodigious output, producing a nearly continuous stream of particles, whereas a synchrotron will only periodically raise the particles to sufficient energy to merit a "shot" at the target. (The burst can be held or stored in the ring at energy to give the experimental electronics time to work, but the average output current is still limited.) The high density of the output makes the linac particularly attractive for use in loading storage ring facilities with particles in preparation for particle to particle collisions. The high mass output also makes the device practical for the production of antimatter particles, which are generally difficult to obtain, being only a small fraction of a target's collision products. These may then be stored and further used to study matter-antimatter annihilation.
Medical linacs.
Linac-based radiation therapy for cancer treatment began with the first patient treated in 1953 in London, UK, at the Hammersmith Hospital, with an 8 MV machine built by Metropolitan-Vickers and installed in 1952, as the first dedicated medical linac. A short while later in 1954, a 6 MV linac was installed in Stanford, USA, which began treatments in 1956. 
Medical linear accelerators accelerate electrons using a tuned-cavity waveguide, in which the RF power creates a standing wave. Some linacs have short, vertically mounted waveguides, while higher energy machines tend to have a horizontal, longer waveguide and a bending magnet to turn the beam vertically towards the patient. Medical linacs use monoenergetic electron beams between 4 and 25 MeV, giving an X-ray output with a spectrum of energies up to and including the electron energy when the electrons are directed at a high-density (such as tungsten) target. The electrons or X-rays can be used to treat both benign and malignant disease. The LINAC produces a reliable, flexible and accurate radiation beam. The versatility of LINAC is a potential advantage over cobalt therapy as a treatment tool. In addition, the device can simply be powered off when not in use; there is no source requiring heavy shielding – although the treatment room itself requires considerable shielding of the walls, doors, ceiling etc. to prevent escape of scattered radiation. Prolonged use of high powered (>18 MeV) machines can induce a significant amount of radiation within the metal parts of the head of the machine after power to the machine has been removed (i.e. they become an active source and the necessary precautions must be observed).
Application for medical isotope development.
The expected shortages of Mo-99, and the technetium-99m medical isotope obtained from it, have also shed light onto linear accelerator technology to produce Mo-99 from non-enriched Uranium through neutron bombardment. This would enable the medical isotope industry to manufacture this crucial isotope by a sub-critical process. The aging facilities, for example the Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario, Canada, which still now produce most Mo-99 from highly enriched uranium could be replaced by this new process. In this way, the sub-critical loading of soluble uranium salts in heavy water with subsequent photo neutron bombardment and extraction of the target product, Mo-99, will be achieved.