Crystal Channelling in Accelerators

Crystal lattice can trap and channel particle beams along major crystallographic directions. In a bent crystal, the channelled particles follow the bend. This makes a basis for an elegant technique of beam steering by means of bent channelling crystals, experimentally demonstrated from 3 MeV to 1 TeV. This technique was strongly developed in recent studies at CERN, FNAL, IHEP, and BNL, and can lead to interesting applications also at the LHC, such as crystal collimation making a collider cleaner by an order of magnitude. We review recent developments in the field and show outlook for the future.Comment: Invited talk at 10th European Particle Accelerator Conference (EPAC 06), Edinburgh, UK, 26-30 Jun 200

Channeling of high-energy particles in a multi-wall nanotube

Channeling of high-energy particles in straight and bent multi-wall nanotubes (MWNT) has been studied in computer simulations and compared to the channeling properties of single-wall nanotubes (SWNT) and bent crystal lattices. It is demonstrated that MWNT can efficiently channel positively-charged high-energy particles trapped between the walls of MWNT. Bending dechanneling in MWNT has been computed as a function of the particle momentum to nanotube curvature radius ratio, $pv/R$. It is found that a bent MWNT can steer a particle beam with bending capabilities similar to those of bent silicon crystal lattice and to those of best (i.e. the narrowest) SWNT. In view of channeling applications at particle accelerators, MWNT appear favored as compared to SWNT, because MWNT can be produced quite straight (and in aligned array), while SWNT is typically very curved, thus posing a severe problem for channeling applications. Therefore, we suggest that MWNT provide a better candidate for channeling than SWNT.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Lett.

Verification of crystal collimation model in experiment

The studies of crystal collimation in the experiments at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Tevatron and in computer simulations reveal strong coherent effects observed in a very broad angular range. Our theory explains the effects by coherent scattering on the potential of bent crystal atomic planes, which amplifies beam diffusion in accelerator by orders of magnitude. This coherent scattering in bent crystal is being studied in a CERN SPS experiment. We present Monte Carlo predictions for the SPS and Tevatron experiments, and show the implications of the coherent scattering effect for crystal collimation in the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure