Fig. 10-1 Inside view of a linac accelerator room Accelerator column is a copper cylinder with a length of 3 meters. It is composed of 81 small cells with a circular hole in the center for beam propagation.

Fig. 10-2 Inside view of a synchrotron tunnel The synchrotron is located in the center of the picture. Bending magnets with a blue color have a length of 3 meters. Devices observed on the left side are the beam transport lines from the synchrotron to the storage ring.

The large synchrotron radiation facility SPring-8 is composed of an 8 GeV storage ring which is capable producing the most brilliant synchrotron radiation in the world, and an injector system with a 1 GeV linac and a 8 GeV booster synchrotron which is able to generate electrons and transport them to the storage ring at full energy. The linac, the first accelerator in the system, has an electron generator called the electron gun, followed by 26 accelerator columns with a total length of 140 meters. They are installed in a precise straight line with a variation of less than 0.15 mm by using a laser system to eliminate errors due to the curvature of the earth's surface. Electrons are generated at the cathode which is heated to 1,000 degrees cent. in the electron gun and accelerated by microwaves in the accelerator columns. The operation cycle of the linac is 60 pps. The booster synchrotron, the second accelerator, is a ring-type machine having various magnets and radio frequency cavities installed along a circumference of 396 meters, and also having an evacuated beam duct. The electrons are injected at 1 GeV and accelerated up to 8 GeV in the synchrotron before they are extracted to be transported to the storage ring. The operation cycle of the synchrotron is 1 pps. The commissioning of three accelerator beams was successfully completed and the storage ring proved to store electrons stably with a long lifetime. Many scientists will find the SPring-8 synchrotron radiation valuable for various kinds of advanced research. The dedication for public use of SPring-8 was held in October of 1997.

Reference H. Yokomizo et al., Linac and Booster Synchrotron for SPring-8 Injector, Proc. 5th European Particle Accelerator Conf., 688 (1996).

Select a topic in left column