Daniel Sexton

High power operation of the JLab IR FEL driver accelerator

Operation of the JLab IR Upgrade FEL at CW powers in excess of 10 kW requires sustained production of high electron beam powers by the driver ERL. This in turn demands attention to numerous issues and effects, including: cathode lifetime; control of beamline and RF system vacuum during high current operation; longitudinal space charge; longitudinal and transverse matching of irregular/large volume phase space distributions; halo management; management of remnant dispersive effects; resistive wall, wake-field, and RF heating of beam vacuum chambers; the beam break up instability; the impact of coherent synchrotron radiation (both on beam quality and the performance of laser optics); magnetic component stability and reproducibility; and RF stability and reproducibility. We discuss our experience with these issues and describe the modus vivendi that has evolved during prolonged high current, high power beam and laser operation.

DC High Voltage Conditioning of Photoemission Guns at Jefferson Lab FEL

DC high voltage photoemission electron guns with GaAs photocathodes have been used to produce polarized electron beams for nuclear physics experiments for about 3 decades with great success. In the late 1990s, Jefferson Lab adopted this gun technology for a free electron laser (FEL), but to assist with high bunch charge operation, considerably higher bias voltage is required compared to the photoguns used at the Jefferson Lab Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. The FEL gun has been conditioned above 400 kV several times, albeit encountering non‐trivial challenges with ceramic insulators and field emission from electrodes. Recently, high voltage processing with krypton gas was employed to process very stubborn field emitters. This work presents a summary of the high voltage techniques used to high voltage condition the Jefferson Lab FEL photoemission gun.

RMS emittance measurements using optical transition radiation interferometry at the Jefferson Lab FEL

Optical transition radiation interferometry (OTRI) has proven to be effective tool for measuring rms beam divergence. We present rms emittance measurement results of the 115 MeV energy recovery linac at the Thomas Jefferson National Laboratorys Free Electron Laser using OTRI. OTR data from both near field beam images and far field angular distribution images give evidence of two spatial and angular distributions within the beam. Using the unique features of OTRI we segregate the two distributions of the beam and estimate separate rms emittance values for each component.

Development of BPM Electronics at the JLAB FEL

A new version of BPM electronics based on the AD8362 RMS detector, which is a direct RF to DC converter, is under development at the JLAB FEL. Each of these new BPM electronics utilizes an embedded ColdFire Microprocessor for data processing and communication with the EPICS control system via TCP/IP. The ColdFire runs RTEMS, which is an open source real‐time operating system. The JLAB FEL is a SRF Energy Recovery LINAC capable of running up to 10 mA CW beam with a 74.85 MHz micropulse frequency. For diagnostic reasons and for machine tune up, the micropulse frequency can be reduced to 1.17 MHz, which corresponds to about 160 μA of beam current. It is required that the BPM system would be functional for all micropulse frequencies. By taking into account the headroom for the beam steering and current variations the dynamic range of the RF front end is required to be about 60 dB. A BPM resolution of at least 100 μm is required, whereas better resolution is very desirable to make it possible for more accurate...

Simplified charged particle beam transport modeling using commonly available commercial software

Particle beam modeling in accelerators has been the focus of considerable effort since the 1950s. Many generations of tools have resulted from this process, each leveraging both prior experience and increases in computer power. However, continuing innovation in accelerator technology results in systems that are not well described by existing tools, so the software development process is on-going. We discuss a novel response to this situation, which was encountered when Jefferson Lab began operation of its energy-recovering linacs. These machines were not readily described with legacy software; therefore a model was built using Microsoft Excel. This interactive simulation can query data from the accelerator, use it to compute machine parameters, analyze difference orbit data, and evaluate beam properties. It can also derive new accelerator tunings and rapidly evaluate the impact of changes in machine configuration. As it is spreadsheet-based, it can be easily user-modified in response to changing requirements. Examples for the JLab IR upgrade FEL are presented.