Equipartitioning in a high current proton linac

The code PARMILA simulates the beam transmission through the Accelerator for the Production of Tritium (APT) linac. The beam is equipartitioned when the longitudinal and transverse temperatures are equal. This paper explores the consequence of equipartitioning in the APT linac. The simulations begin with a beam that starts at the ion-source plasma surface. PARMILA tracks the particles from the RFQ exit through the 1.7-GeV linac. This paper compares two focusing schemes. One scheme uses mostly equal strength quadrupoles. The equipartitioning scheme uses weaker focusing in the high-energy portion of the linac. The RMS beam size with the equipartitioning scheme is larger, but the relative size of the halo is less than in the equal-strength design