STRETCHED WIRE MECHANICS

Stretched wires are beginning to play an important role in the alignment of accelerators and synchrotron light sources. Stretched wires are proposed for the alignment of the 130 meter long LCLS undulator. Wire position technology has reached sub-micron resolution yet analyses of perturbations to wire straightness are hard to find. This paper considers possible deviations of stretched wire from the simple 2-dimensional catenary form.