Beam emittance

Emittance is a property of a charged particle beam in a particle accelerator. It is a measure for the average spread of particle coordinates in position-and-momentum phase space and has the dimension of length (e.g., meters) or length times angle (meters times radians). As a particle beam propagates along magnets and other beam-manipulating components of an accelerator, the position spread may change, but in a way that does not change the emittance. If the distribution over phase space is represented as a cloud in a plot (see figure), emittance is the area of the cloud. A more exact definition handles the fuzzy borders of the cloud and the case of a cloud that does not have an elliptical shape.