The Automatic Phasing System for the Stanford Two-Mile Linear Electron Accelerator

The Stanford 2 mile linear electron accelerator, now under construction, will consist of a straight line array of two hundred and forty 24-megawatt klystron amplifiers, operating at 2856 mc, each feeding four 10-foot accelerator sections made of disk-loaded waveguide. A relativistic bunched electron beam injected at the beginning of the machine will be accelerated to energies up to 20 billion electron volts. The acceleration is achieved through the process of energy transfer from the electromagnetic waves launched by the klystrons in the accelerator sections to the electrons riding on this wave.