An Introduction to...

An Introduction to the Physics of High Energy Accelerators

D.A. Edwards and M.J. Syphers

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., NY (1993)

In the beginning...

In 1986, during a trip to Snowmass, CO to attend a workshop related to the Superconducting Super Collider, we struck up a conversation regarding the possible content one would include in a textbook on accelerators. While many monographs existed which covered the topics of phase stability, strong focusing, synchrotron radiation, and so on, there was no classical-style textbook available, complete with homework problems, which could be used for teaching a course. This was what we set out to produce.

A few weeks later, we had carved out an initial outline. Within one year, the U.S. Particle Accelerator School began to offer courses for college credit. We realized that the best way to develop the material was to teach it and we convinced Mel Month, the school director, to sign us up. The second USPAS to offer credit was held in June of 1988 at Cornell University, during which we taught our first course. The 20-30 pages of lecture notes we generated for that course were turned into a 100-page document for our next go-round two years later, at Harvard University. Soon after that, we had a 150-page document, of which we made copies and distributed for feedback. Augmented with material used for courses at Northwestern University, INFN-Trieste, The University of Hamburg, the University of Texas, and a course at SSC Laboratory, by the time we taught our third USPAS course, at Stanford in 1992, most of the book was complete. Wiley published the text in 1993, just months before the SSC was cancelled.

It is interesting to note that the two authors have never taught from the final text together, though each has used it separately, on occasion, in their teachings during the past 20+ years.