RF Courses

Fundamentals of Radio Frequency Control for Particle Accelerators

Modern particle accelerators use electromagnetic energy at RF frequencies to accelerate particles. This course outlines the fundamental concepts needed to understand the monitoring and of the electromagnetic fields. Often this area of study is called “Low Level RF”. This course was taught at the CERN CAS course on “RF for Accelerators”, 18 June - 01 July 2023, Berlin Germany.

Radio Frequency Concepts and Techniques

This course is an overview of concepts and techniques used in the transmission of electromagnetic energy at radio and microwave frequencies. The course is intended for graduate students working in areas of microwave to millimeter-wave detectors and high speed electronics. The course begins with an overview electromagnetic theory covering the equivalence principle, the induction theorem, and reciprocity. Wave propagation with guided structures and antennae is discussed in detail. Additional topics in active and passive microwave devices, and communication concepts such as signal modulation and band limited white noise are also discussed

Microwave Measurements Laboratory

Class taught with Ralph Pasquinelli of Fermilab for the USPAS. Students are awarded full credit equivalent to graduate course at the host university. The course consists of lectures and hand-on laboratories. Topics of lectures include

  • Microwave Measurements in the time and frequency domains, basics of spectrum analyzers, vector signal analyzers, and time domain reflectometer
  • Transmission lines, complex impedance, reflection coefficients
  • Microwave measurements with a Vector Network Analyzer, basics of vector network analyzers
  • Microwave components and devices, splitters, circulators, directional couplers, filters, etc.
  • Beam signals for Circular Accelerators, beam spectrums, power spectral density, betatron and synchrotron signals
  • Signals, noise, and dynamic range, basic noise performance of devices and systems
  • Impedance matching, basic of matching devices
  • RF cavity measurements, cavity basics, bead pull, coupling, cavity bandwidth