Past exam of the short options paper shared by Prelims and Parts A and B of the physics course of the University of Oxford / 2015 / S19 / 3 / d / Solution

A suitable accelerator-science example is strong focusing. The apparent technical contradiction is that increasing a quadrupole magnet's focusing strength improves confinement in one transverse plane while worsening it in the other. Abandoning that magnet entirely loses its strong focusing action.

An alternating-gradient lattice separates the two actions in space: a focusing quadrupole in one plane is followed, after a drift, by one with the opposite sign, and the pattern repeats. In the other plane their roles reverse. The symmetric thin-lens FODO cell has the same trace $2-d^2/f^2$ in both planes, so both are stable for $0<d/|f|<2$, despite each individual quadrupole defocusing one plane. The noncommuting sequence of drift and lens maps is what makes net confinement possible.

In a TRIZ interpretation, this resolves the contradiction by spatial separation and periodic alternation of opposing functions, rather than demanding that one static element satisfy both. The useful result is smaller beam envelopes and magnet apertures for a suitable lattice. This is a retrospective design analysis; it does not claim that the historical inventors actually followed TRIZ. The matrix calculation supplies a test of the proposed resolution rather than just attaching a slogan to an invention.