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  • Open Access

Effects of curved superconducting magnets on beam stability in a compact ion therapy synchrotron

H. X. Q. Norman*,† and R. B. Appleby

E. Benedetto

S. L. Sheehy‡

  • South East European International Institute for Sustainable Technologies, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland

  • *Contact author: hannah.norman@manchester.ac.uk
  • †Present address: University of Melbourne.
  • ‡Present address: Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization, Lucas Heights, New South Wales 2234, Australia.
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Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams 28, 094701 – Published 8 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/pt8n-h2gn

Abstract

Superconducting, curved magnets can reduce accelerator footprints by producing strong fields (>3  T) and reducing the total number of magnets through their capability for combined-function multipolar fields, making them an attractive choice for applications such as heavy ion therapy. There exists the problem that the effect of strongly curved harmonics and fringe fields on compact accelerator beam dynamics is not well represented: existing approaches use integrated cylindrical multipoles to describe and model the fields for beam dynamics studies, which are invalid in curved coordinate systems and assume individual errors cancel out over the full machine. In the modeling of these machines, the effects of strongly curved harmonics and fringe fields on compact accelerator beam dynamics need to be properly included. An alternative approach must be introduced for capturing off-axis fields in a strongly curved magnet, which may affect long-term beam stability in a compact accelerator. In this article, we investigate the impacts of deploying a curved canted-cosine-theta (CCT) superconducting magnet in a synchrotron for the first time. We develop a method to analyze and characterize the 3D curved fields of an electromagnetic model of a CCT developed for the main bending magnets of a compact (27 m circumference) carbon ion therapy synchrotron, designed within the Heavy Ion Therapy Research Integration Plus European project (HITRIPlus), and the CERN Next Ion Medical Machine Study (NIMMS). The fields are modelled in the compact synchrotron in mad-x/ptc to study their effects on beam dynamics and long-term beam stability. Results indicate that the synchrotron is able to operate with the presence of the magnetic field gradients, with considerable improvement to the long-term beam stability in the machine after tuning the higher order field gradients. The insights gained through the methods presented allow the optimisation of both magnet and synchrotron designs, with the potential to impact the operational performance of future ion therapy facilities.

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Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams 28, 094701– Published 8 September, 2025
  • Received 7 February 2025
  • Accepted 1 August 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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