A Ceramic Vacuum Chamber for a Fast-Cycling Proton Synchrotron

Alumina ceramic vacuum chambers are proposed in the area of the magnets for the 8-GeV injector synchrotron of the 200-GeV accelerator. The chambers cannot be made in one piece, and the only acceptable joint involves metal, which has a perturbing effect on the magnetic field. For this reason it was proposed that the longest possible ceramic be used to keep the joints to a minimum, but long ceramics require wider tolerances, and this becomes costly in magnet gap. Sample ceramics produced by industry were examined, and from the results the overall cost of ceramics and magnet gap were related to ceramic length. Installing and locating the chambers in the magnet gap is difficult due to the restrictions of shape and size of the gap.