This book is written for students who ever wondered about the mysterious and fascinating world of particle accelerators. What exciting physics and technologies lie within? What clever and ingenious ideas were applied in their seven decades of evolution? What promises still lay ahead in the future?
Accelerators have been driving research and industrial advances for decades. This textbook illustrates the physical principles behind these incredible machines, often with intuitive pictures and simple mathematical models. Pure formalisms are avoided as much as possible. It is hoped that the readers would enjoy the fascinating physics behind these state-of-the-art devices.
The style is informal and aimed for a graduate level without prerequisite of prior knowledge in accelerators. To serve as a textbook, references are listed only on the more established original literature and review articles instead of the constantly changing research frontiers.
Born in Taiwan, Alexander Wu Chao received his BSc degree from Tsinghua University in 1970. After one year of military service, he went abroad for graduate study at Stony Brook University in New York. He received his PhD in 1974. After graduation, he went to Stanford Linear Accelerator Center as postdoc and since then dedicated his career to accelerator theory.
In 1984, he joined the Superconducting Super Collider Central Design Group at Berkeley as its accelerator physics division head, and in 1989 proceeded to join the SSC Laboratory in Texas until its closure by the US government in 1993. He returned to SLAC and Stanford University as a professor in 1993 and stayed until retirement in 2019.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, Academician of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, winner of the European Physical Society Wideroe Prize, USPAS Achievement Prize, and the American Physical Society Wilson Prize.