U.S. Particle Accelerator School
Colliders for High Energy and Nuclear Physics
Sponsor:
Texas A&M University Public Partnership & Outreach
Course Name:
Colliders for High Energy and Nuclear Physics
Instructor:
Vladimir Shiltsev, Valeri Lebedev and Nikolai Mokhov, Fermilab
Purpose and Audience
Since the middle of the 20th century, charged particle colliders have been at the forefront of scientific discoveries in high-energy and nuclear physics. Collider accelerator technology and beam physics have progressed immensely and modern facilities now operate at energies and luminosities many orders of magnitude greater than the pioneering colliders of the early 1960s. In addition, the field of colliders remains extremely dynamic and continues to develop many innovative approaches. A number of novel concepts are currently being considered for designing and constructing even more powerful colliders. This course will review colliding-beam method and the history of colliders, survey the fundamental accelerator physics phenomena, present the major achievements of operational machines and the key features of near-term collider projects that are currently under development in both high-energy and nuclear physics. We will also briefly overview future project directions in High Energy Physics (HEP) and Nuclear Physics (NP). This course is designed for graduate students and researchers in physics or engineering who want to learn in more detail about the basic concepts and beam physics of particle colliders.
Prerequisites
Courses in classical mechanics, electrodynamics, special relativity and physical or engineering mathematics, all at entrance graduate level; and the USPAS course Fundamentals of Accelerator Physics and Technology with Simulations and Measurements Lab or equivalent familiarity with accelerators at undergraduate or graduate level are required. It is recommended that students have general familiarity with the following topics: spin dynamics, RF focusing, impedances, instabilities for mono-energetic continuous beam and point-like bunches, Landau damping for a continuous beam, and particle passage through a medium (energy loss, multiple scattering, nuclear scattering).
It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that they meet the course prerequisites or have equivalent experience.
Objectives
On completion of this course, the students are expected to understand the physical principles that make high energy particle colliders function, become familiar with: leading operational and near-future colliders (LHC, SuperKEKB, EIC, etc); the limits of present colliding beam technologies and the promise of future ones, and the issues presented by forefront applications.
Instructional Method
This course includes a series of lectures and problem recitation sessions. Daily homework problems will be assigned which will be graded and solutions will be provided and reviewed in the recitation sessions. Instructors and a teaching assistant will be available for guidance during evening homework sessions.
Course Content
Review of the colliding beam method: history, modern colliders, future colliders (hadron, ee, μμ, linear colliders, plasma-based, polarization). The focus of the course is on the hadron and electron-ion colliders. Luminosity figures of merit, and tune shifts due to collisions, head-on and parasitic beam-beam interactions, final focus systems and optics solutions compensation, intra-beam scattering in ultra-relativistic beams, coherent beam-beam effects and their relationship to the impedance driven transverse instabilities, machine-detector interface, collimation, detector protection; cooling high energy beams of charged particles (electron cooling, stochastic cooling, OSC, CEC).
Beam delivery systems and the Machine-Detector Interface will be considered in detail the second week of this USPAS session in the course “Collider Interaction Regions for High Energy and Nuclear Physics Applications”. We recommend students interested in collider machine interaction region issues take this related course.
Reading Requirements
(to be provided by the USPAS) Particle Accelerator Physics (Fourth Edition) by Helmut Wiedemann, Springer, 2015. A pdf of this book is available for free at https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319183169.
Perspective students can prepare for the course in advance and/or evaluate the fit of the course to their goals, by studying the following comprehensive review of high energy physics colliders:
V. Shiltsev and F. Zimmermann, “Modern and Future Colliders,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 93, 015006 (2021)
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.93.015006
and/or the following freely distributed book:
“Accelerator Physics at the Tevatron Collider,” V. Lebedev and V. Shiltsev editors, Springer (2014)
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4939-0885-1
Credit Requirements
Students will be evaluated based on the following performances: Homework assignments (60% course grade), Final exam (40% course grade).
Indiana University course number: Physics 671, "Advanced Topics in Accelerator Physics"
Michigan State University course number: PHY 963, "U.S. Particle Accelerator School"
MIT course number: 8.790, "Accelerator Physics"