Beam stop design methodology and description of a new SNS beam stop

The design of accelerator components such as magnets, accelerator cavities and beam instruments tends to be a fairly standardized and collective effort within the particle accelerator community with well established performance, reliability and, in some cases, even budgetary criteria. Beam stop design, by contrast, has been comparatively subjective historically with much more general goals. This lack of rigor has lead to a variety of facility implementations with limited standardization and minimal consensus on approach to development within the particle accelerator community. At the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), for example, there are four high power beam stops in use, three of which have significantly different design solutions. This paper describes the design of a new off-momentum beam stop for the SNS. The technical description of the system will be complemented by a discussion of design methodology.