Beam halo creation and propagation in the University of Maryland Electron Ring

In this thesis we discuss the phenomenon of halo creation in charged particle beams. For this, we combine analytical, numerical and experimental work, which focuses on the University of Maryland Electron Ring, but is applicable to a wide range of accelerators in the same intensity regime. We find that the details of the beam distribution do not affect the structure of the halo, but are nonetheless important as they determine the number of particles in the halo and whether the latter can be regenerated. Furthermore, we show that the halo in configuration and velocity space comprises of the same particles, a prediction that has great importance for halo removal and diagnostics. In particular, we show that even in the case of ideal halo removal in phase space, the complicated internal dynamics of the beam core lead to halo regeneration. Following on previous work, we construct a theoretical particle-core model that includes skew quadrupoles and compare our results to simulations and experiments. The agreement between these approaches is satisfactory, within the constraints of each case