SOLITARY WAVES IN PARTICLE BEAMS

Since space charge waves on a particle beam exhibit both dispersive and nonlinear character, solitary waves or solitons are possible. Dispersive, nonlinear wave propagation in high current beams is found to be similar to ion-acoustic waves in plasmas with an analogy between Debye screening and beam pipe shielding. Exact longitudinal solitary wave propagation is found for potentials associated with certain transverse distributions which fill the beam pipe. For weak dispersion, the waves satisfy the Korteweg-deVries (KdV) equation, but for strong dispersion they exhibit breaking. More physically realizable distributions which do not fill the beam pipe are investigated and shown to also satisfy a KdV equation for weak dispersion if averaging over rapid transverse motion is physically justified. Scaling laws are presented to explore likely parameter regimes where these phenomena may be observed experimentally