Beam Physics and Delivery

TRIUMF’s Beam Delivery team assists with the delivering of beams to experimental facilities, with a particular focus on TRIUMF’s rare isotope beam facility, ISAC. Our primarily role is one of coordination between experimenters, Accelerator Operations, and other support groups. Team members also provide expert-level support for beam tuning, run planning, and other related activities. 

The Beam Delivery team also support the development of control-room applications which help to reduce accelerator tuning overhead while improving the quality and reliability of the beams delivered. Through these applications, we bring the latest progress in model-assisted beam tuning and machine learning to TRIUMF’s control rooms. 

Furthermore, the team is responsible for maintaining an online guide for experimenters at TRIUMF, the purpose of which is to provide the information necessary to allow a user of the lab to propose, plan, and run an experiment at TRIUMF. That guide can be found here: TRIUMF: Guide for experimenters

At TRIUMF, as in other accelerator labs, we use electric and magnetic fields to control the charged particles that we accelerate and deliver to various experiments. We need to keep our beams focused to counteract the natural divergence coming from finite emittances and the intrinsic defocusing forces such as space charge (the repulsive Coulomb forces between particles of the same charge). Different experimenters have different requirements, but they often amount to transporting the beam with minimal losses by keeping it well confined transversely and longitudinally, while matching the final beam size to the dimensions of a particular target, and meeting a specific time structure, energy spread and/or isotopic purity.  

The experiments conducted at TRIUMF require a wide range of beam energies and particle types, from elementary particles to various isotopes with different charge states. The settings of our magnets, electrostatic lenses and radio-frequency cavities need to be tailored to the specificity of each beam. In other words: we cannot set and forget. And this is where beam physics plays a crucial role: the number of devices to adjust each time is in the hundreds, and we rely on accurate physics models to predict the optimum setting of individual components. Due to errors and uncertainties intrinsic to each beamline (misalignments, magnetic hysteresis, etc.), the model prediction is never perfect but provides a good initial guess allowing a human operator, or an AI agent, to converge rapidly to the actual optimum with respect to the users’ requirements.  

High-intensity beams are also crucial for high-power applications such as nuclear medicine and energy production. Our research is focused on exploring ways to evolve the present technology – with cyclotron and linear accelerators – to meet these emerging needs of the wider Canadian and international community. As Canada’s center of excellence in accelerator science, we collaborate with partners across Canada on several accelerator R&D projects, providing support, guidance, and training to students (undergraduate students though TRIUMF’s co-op program, and graduate and Phd students of our member universities). 

We also develop and maintain the numerical simulation tools required from accelerator design. This includes TRIUMF-maintained packages as well as the contribution to open-source projects led by our Canadian and International partners.