<p>edoardo: Let’s start with the more critical part.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>You HAVE TO decide what you are using your proton beam for, and hence, the maximum producible energy with your particle accelerator, not just start with ‘fun’ in mind. The only ‘fun’ that I envision with a 100 keV beam is an investigation of the somatic effects of exposing yourself to ionizing radiation.</p></li>
<li><p>I’m not sure why you’re looking for a guide to build a linear accelerator. Generating a considerable beam - high current and focusing action - with a direct voltage method (linac) is much harder than with a variable voltage-high frequency method. Also, you suggested that you want to produce a proton beam; if you understand the design concept of a linear accelerator, you’ll realize that it’s more suitable for exciting electrons or positrons. A linear accelerator designed to produce an ion beam is not impossible, but requires some engineering ingenuity.</p></li>
<li><p>Building a particle accelerator requires you to invest considerable amount of money and time. Nowadays, you could get proton linear accelerators capable of reaching in excess of 10 MeV straight off industrial production. These are properly designed down to each mm in dimension, and cannot be bested with a student budget. There are thousands of these in operation today and being used for medical research. Hitachi PIP makes the best proton linacs in this range of energies. I hope it also doesn’t surprise you that nearly all of the interesting phenomena associated with theoretical physics in this energy range have already been exhausted by the 60s. What I’m driving at: if you love physics/nuclear engineering and find it enjoyable, there are other avenues to invest your resources on which are not only as enjoyable, but also possibly more meaningful. Say, improving radiation transport/disposal.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Okay, that was the disclaimer. If you still want to proceed, I’d recommend these resources.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what’s your existing understanding of knowledge in mechanical/electronics/physics, so you might need to know how to operate some tools. I recommend “Basic machining reference handbook” by Meyers and Slattery and “Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits” by Graf because these are free on Google books. The latter is a collection of published designs (e.g. from HAM radio magazines) nicely organized - doesn’t help you directly, but will give you many ideas on putting together smaller components.</p>
<p>Building Scientific Apparatus (ISBN 0813340063). Buy this book if you can. If not, steal it. It presents an understanding of vacuum designs, drawing, tooling and machining at just the right level of depth for a basement project.</p>
<p>Also get an introductory text in nuclear physics. There isn’t a bad intro text as far as I’m concern. The one by Enge was used as a second-third year course at MIT and is pretty canonical. Granted, it is a little older, but it covers the same content at a tenth the cost of those newer, huge books that colleges will you recommend you nowadays.</p>
<p>Particle accelerators have very old designs - there isn’t a “guide” on building one because they’re all designed differently because of availability of apparatuses or facilities, financial constraints, different research objectives. What you need, however, is an understanding of the key components on every particle accelerator, and reading up old publications from where they started building the particular type of particle accelerator (linac, cyclotron, synchrotron etc.) is how you should do it. (Wikipedia, or for that matter, Enge, only offer narratives about these.) Once you understand the fundamentals, there’s nothing wrong with a DIY design: that’s how it’s done, there’s no guide to follow. My only warning here is that old publications can be very confusing because of CGS/MKS units.</p>
<p>I don’t know a good text to recommend for radiation shielding - I know many bad texts on this though, but you’ll need to know how to do shielding calculations nonetheless. You need at least a QUANTITATIVE understanding of attenuation, Compton scattering, photoelectric effect, radiation emission and dosimetry. It’s college-level work, but it’s only a snapshot of the whole subject of radiation shielding. Try Shultis & Faw.</p>
<p>Computer applications… National Semiconductor’s WEBENCH. You’re going to need to play with plenty of electronics, and this really saves a lot of design effort, simulation time, money and shopping time (reading electronics catalogs for days feels like getting rejected by your dream school). You’ll most likely need attain your energies with a circuit based on vacuum triodes OR one based on field effect transistors. Poisson Superfish is good for electromagnet design. MATLAB will be pretty versatile for this as well, but getting a legal copy or prior programming experience are questions to be answered.</p>
<p>You’ll definitely need more reference texts than the ones I recommended. Feel free to message me if you need more advice.</p>