Industrial Applications of Accelerators

Sponsoring University:

Stony Brook University (ONLINE)

Course Name:

Industrial Applications of Accelerators

Instructor:

William Barletta, MIT

Purpose and Audience
This course is an introduction to the uses of accelerators in economically important industrial applications.

Prerequisites
Upper division undergraduate courses in electromagnetism (at the level of "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by David J. Griffiths) and in modern physics (relativity solid state physics and quantum mechanics).

It is the responsibility of the student to ensure that they meet the course prerequisites or have equivalent experience.

Objectives
This class will introduce students to the primary ways in which accelerators are used in industrial processes. It aims to explain the physical, technological, and economic factors that an inventor or entrepreneur should include to assess the practicality of using accelerators as part of an industrial or medical process.

Instructional Method
The course consists of lectures in both morning (2 hrs. per class day), and afternoon sessions (1.5 hrs. per class day). In addition, the afternoon sessions will include case studies of designing accelerators to be used in industry or in research and characterization facilities used by industries. The course will include several invited lectures.

Course Content
Accelerators are used in a wide range of industrial processes with an economic value of several tens of billions of dollars annually in the U.S. alone. These applications include radio-pharmaceutical preparation, semi-conductor manufacturing, polymer cross-linking, sterilization and de-infestation, non-destructive testing, and material identification and assaying. The types of accelerators include electron and ion machines with energies ranging from hundreds of keV to several GeV.

The course will cover the basic physics of the underlying processes that govern several important industrial processes. From the physics or chemistry requirements, the course will derive the requisite beam characteristics to implement the application in an energy efficient and cost effective manner. The beam characteristics will then be used to identify, characterize and compare potential candidate accelerators for the industrial user.

Reading Requirements
(to be provided by the USPAS) "Industrial Accelerators and Their Applications" by Robert W. and Marianne E. Hamm, World Scientific publishers (2012).

Credit Requirements
Students will be evaluated based on homework (30%) and case study assignments (70%)

Stony Brook University course number: PHY 689 01
Indiana University course number: Physics 671, Advanced Topics in Accelerator Physics
Michigan State University course number: PHY 963 US Particle Accelerator School
MIT course number: 8.790, Accelerator Physics