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next planned revision: 2009-11 |
A section is a part of a beam pipe that covers a sector. The term comes originally from the alternate-gradient accelerators (CERN's Proton Synchrotron being the first one) where there were sections with magnetic field, sections for acceleration, straight sections without magnetic field and so on. Each section formed a mechanical whole.
Sections in the game simulate curved sections with magnetic fields to hold the particles in orbit.
In Revolution we have polygons but not Bezier curves. We approximate a curved segment with a polygon, adding just two points in the middle to approximate the curvature better.
There are two template segments: one for the inner ring and one for the outer ring.
In the figure these two basic segments are represented by the polygons ABCDEF and GHIJKL respectively.
Simple trigonometry gives us the coordinates of the polygon points.
For each element of the accelerators there is a path followed by the particle bunches when they are inside the element. In the case of a segment the path lies in the middle and it is defined by the points P1P2P3 for the inner ring segment and by P4P5P6 for the path through the outer ring segment.
Each path is divided into a number cPathdivision parts (usually 8), hence for the path through the inner ring segment there are half that number from P1 to P2 and the other half from P2 to P3 and similarly for the path through the outer ring segment.