Impedance and Collective Effects

As the beam intensity increases, the beam can no longer be considered as a collection of non-interacting single particles: in addition to the “single-particle phenomena”, “collective effects” become significant. At low intensity a beam of charged particles moves around an accelerator under the Lorentz force produced by the “external” electromagnetic fields (from the guiding and focusing magnets, RF cavities, etc.). However, the charged particles also interact with themselves (leading to space charge effects) and with their environment, inducing charges and currents in the surrounding structures, which create electromagnetic fields called wake fields. In the ultra-relativistic limit, causality dictates that there can be no electromagnetic field in front of the beam, which explains the term “wake”. It is often useful to examine the frequency content of the wake field (a time domain quantity) by performing a Fourier transformation on it. This leads to the concept of impedance (a frequency domain quantity), which is a complex function of frequency. The charged particles can also interact with other charged particles present in the accelerator (leading to two-stream effects, and in particular to electron cloud effects in positron/hadron machines) and with the counter-rotating beam in a collider (leading to beam–beam effects). As the beam intensity increases, all these “perturbations” should be properly quantified and the motion of the charged particles will eventually still be governed by the Lorentz force but using the total electromagnetic fields, which are the sum of the external and perturbation fields. Note that in some cases a perturbative treatment is not sufficient and the problem has to be solved self consistently. These perturbations can lead to both incoherent (i.e. of a single particle) and coherent (i.e. of the centre of mass) effects, in the longitudinal and in one or both transverse directions, leading to beam quality degradation or even partial or total beam losses. Fortunately, stabilising mechanisms exist, such as Landau damping, electronic feedback systems and linear coupling between the transverse planes (as in the case of a transverse coherent instability, one plane is usually more critical than the other).