Phase-space electronic ray description for charged-particle beam transport: Quantum-like corrections vs. classical picture

The classical description of charged-particle beam transport (based on a phase-space equation for electronic rays) and the quantum-like one (based on a Wigner-like transform) are compared. In this comparison the thermal wave model (TWM) is recovered in semiclassical approximation as well as an analysis for the quantum-like corrections is presented. Going beyond the semiclassical approximation, we suggest a novel tomographic approach to charged-particle beam physics, recently proposed in quantum optics, which allows us to describe the beam transport in terms of a marginal distribution which contains all the information of the Wigner function.