Accelerator Engineering and Technology: Accelerator Technology

Magnets are at the core of both circular and linear accelerators. The main function of a magnet is to guide the charged particle beam by virtue of the Lorentz force, given by the following expression:where q is the electrical charge of the particle, v its velocity, and B the magnetic field induction. The trajectory of a particle in the field depends hence on the particle velocity and on the space distribution of the field. The simplest case is that of a uniform magnetic field with a single component and velocity v normal to it, in which case the particle trajectory is a circle. A uniform field has thus a pure bending effect on a charged particle, and the magnet that generates it is generally referred to as a dipole.