Image effects on the transport of intense beams

The effects of a conducting pipe on the equilibrium of intense nonaxisymmetric continuous beams are investigated. First, we analyze the image effects of a cylindrical conducting pipe on a beam with elliptical symmetry. It is derived an exact expression for the self-field potential of the beam inside the pipe without using any sort of multipole expansion. By means of a variational method we search for equilibrium solutions for such intense beams. Finally, we prove that despite the nonlinear forces imposed by the image charges of an arbitrary shape conducting pipe, equilibrium intense beams preserve density homogeneity and their free-space transverse sizes.