The Astron Linear Accelerator

One of the primary requirements of the Astron controlled thermonuclear reactor experiment is an intense beam of relativistic electrons. An accelerator to produce such a beam with currents of the order of several hundred amperes has been in operation at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Livermore, for several years. The accelerator operates on the principle of magnetic induction as applied to a linear accelerator. The original accelerator has been redesigned and rebuilt in order to increase the output beam current, to increase the beam energy, and to improve the quality of the output beam. Given in Table I is a comparison between the original machine and the design parameters for the new machine.