By Dieter Möhl
Springer
Paperback: £31.99 €36.87 $39.50
E-book: £24.99 €29.74 $49.95
Over the past decades, stochastic cooling of particle beams has grown, thrived and led to breathtaking results in physics from accelerator labs around the world. Now, great challenges lie ahead in the context of future projects, which strive for highly brilliant secondary-particle beams. For newcomers and researchers alike, there is no better place to learn about stochastic cooling than this book.
Dieter Möhl was one of the foremost experts in the field; ever since the beginning of the adventure in the 1970s, in the team of Simon van der Meer at CERN. Here he has surpassed himself to produce a personal book based not only on his masterful lectures over the years, but also covering, in the proper context and depth, additional subjects that have previously been dispersed across the specialized literature. He goes further by illustrating concepts with his recent personal studies on future projects (e.g. the accumulator ring RESR for the FAIR project) and is well placed to suggest innovations (e.g. alternative methods for stacking and momentum cooling, “split-function” lattices). Insightful remarks based on his experience, invaluable calculation recipes, realistic numerical examples, as well as an excellent bibliography go together to round up the whole book.
In this self-contained book, Möhl provides a superb pedagogical and concise treatment of the subject, from fundamental concepts up to advanced subjects. He describes the analytical formalism of stochastic cooling, stressing, whenever important, its interplay with the machine hardware and beam diagnostics.
The first six chapters introduce the ingredients of the state of the art of stochastic cooling. With deep insight, Möhl explains in chapter 2 all of the different techniques for betatron and/or momentum cooling. This is the most thorough yet compact overview that I know of, a great service to system designers and operators. In both the time-domain and frequency-domain pictures, the reader is guided step by step and with great clarity into delicate aspects of the subject (for instance, the mixing and power requirements) as well as rather complex calculations (such as for betatron cooling, the feedback via the beam and the cooling by nonlinear pickups and kickers). A great help to newcomers and a handy reference for the experts comes in the form of the comprehensive summary on the pickup and kicker impedances in chapter 3 as well as the discussion of the Schottky noise in chapter 4.
Chapter 7 deals with the Fokker-Planck equation and remarkably summarizes its most important application, namely in modelling the beam accumulation by stochastic cooling. The notoriously difficult bunched-beam cooling, which is of great interest for future colliders, is lucidly reviewed in chapter 8.
Dieter Möhl had practically finished the book when he unexpectedly passed away. Throughout this work of reference, his modesty and generosity emerge together with the quintessence of stochastic cooling, as part of his legacy.
