High intensity proton synchrotrons

Strong initiatives are being pursued in a number of countries for the construction of ‘‘kaon factory’’ synchrotrons capable of producing 100 times more intense proton beams than those available now from machines such as the Brookhaven AGS and CERN PS. Such machines would yield equivalent increases in the fluxes of secondary particles (kaons, pions, muons, antiprotons, hyperons and neutrinos of all varieties)—or cleaner beams for a smaller increase in flux—opening new avenues to various fundamental questions in both particle and nuclear physics. Major areas of investigation would be rare decay modes, CP violation, meson and hadron spectroscopy, antinucleon interactions, neutrino scattering and oscillations, and hypernuclear properties. Experience with the pion factories has already shown how high beam intensities make it possible to explore the ‘‘precision frontier’’ with results complementary to those achievable at the ‘‘energy frontier’’.This paper will describe proposals for upgrading and AGS and for building kaon factories in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States, emphasizing the novel aspects of accelerator design required to achieve the desired performance (typically 100 μA at 30 GeV).