K. Smith

High Current Energy Recovery Linac at BNL

We present the design and parameters of an energy recovery linac (ERL) facility, which is under construction in the Collider-Accelerator Department at BNL. This R&D facility has the goal of demonstrating CW operation of an ERL with an average beam current in the range of 0.1 - 1 ampere and with very high efficiency of energy recovery. The possibility of a future upgrade to a two-pass ERL is also being considered. The heart of the facility is a 5-cell 703.75 MHz super-conducting RF linac with strong Higher Order Mode (HOM) damping. The flexible lattice of the ERL provides a test-bed for exploring issues of transverse and longitudinal instabilities and diagnostics of intense CW electron beams. This ERL is also perfectly suited for a far-IR FEL. We present the status and plans for construction and commissioning of this facility.

Electron Cooling of RHIC

We report progress on the R&D program for electron-cooling of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). This electron cooler is designed to cool 100 GeV/nucleon at storage energy using 54 MeV electrons. The electron source will be a superconducting RF photocathode gun. The accelerator will be a superconducting energy recovery linac. The frequency of the accelerator is set at 703.75 MHz. The maximum electron bunch frequency is 9.38 MHz, with bunch charge of 20 nC. The R&D program has the following components: The photoinjector and its photocathode, the superconducting linac cavity, start-to-end beam dynamics with magnetized electrons, electron cooling calculations including benchmarking experiments and development of a large superconducting solenoid. The photoinjector and linac cavity are being incorporated into an energy recovery linac aimed at demonstrating ampere class current at about 20 MeV.

Extremely High Current, High-Brightness Energy Recovery Linac

Next generation light-sources, electron coolers, high-power FELs, Compton X-ray sources and many other accelerators were made possible by the emerging technology of high-power, high-brightness electron beams. In order to get the anticipated performance level of ampere-class currents, many technological barriers are yet to be broken. BNL’s Collider-Accelerator Department is pursuing some of these technologies for its electron cooling of RHIC application, as well as a possible future electron-hadron collider. We will describe work on CW, high-current and high-brightness electron beams. This will include a description of a superconducting, laser-photocathode RF gun and an accelerator cavity capable of producing low emittance (about 1 micron rms normalized) one nano-Coulomb bunches at currents of the order of one ampere average.

Commissioning of RHIC deuteron-gold collisions

Deuteron and gold beams have been accelerated to a collision energy of /spl radic/s = 200 GeV/u in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), providing the first asymmetric-species collisions of this complex. Necessary changes for this mode of operation include new ramping software and asymmetric crossing angle geometries. This paper reviews machine performance, problems encountered and their solutions, and accomplishments during the 16 weeks of ramp-up and operations.

RHIC challenges for low energy operations

There is significant interest in RHIC heavy ion collisions at radics =5-50 GeV/u, motivated by a search for the QCD phase transition critical point. The lowest energies are well below the nominal RHIC gold injection radics = 19.6 GeV/u. There are several challenges that face RHIC operations in this regime, including longitudinal acceptance, magnet field quality, lattice control, and luminosity monitoring. We report on the status of work to address these challenges, including results from beam tests of low energy RHIC operations with protons and gold.

Topology for a DSP based beam control system in the AGS booster

The AGS Booster supports beams of ions and protons with a wide range of energies on a pulse-by-pulse modulation basis. This requires an agile beam control system highly integrated with its controls. To implement this system digital techniques in the form of: Digital Signal Processors, Direct Digital Synthesizers, digital receivers and high speed Analog to Digital Converters are used. Signals from the beam and cavity pick-ups, as well as measurements of magnetic field strength in the ring dipoles are processed in real time. To facilitate this a multi-processor topology with high bandwidth data links is being designed.

Operation of the RHIC RF systems

Operational aspects of the RHIC RF system are described. To date three different beam combinations have been collided for physics production: gold-gold, deuteron-gold, and proton-proton(polarized). To facilitate this flexibility the RF systems of the two rings are independent and self-sufficient. Techniques to cope with problems such as, injection/capture, beam loading, bunch shortening, and RF noise have evolved and are explained.

Progress on the SNS ring LLRF control system

The SNS Ring RF System(1,2) will comprise three h=1 (frev = 1.05 MHz) cavities and one h=2 cavity, each with individual digital LLRF control electronics. During each 1ms accumulation of 1 GeV protons in the SNS ring cycling at 60Hz, circulating intensity increases to 1.5E14 particles. This intensity translates to an average circulating current (at the end of accumulation) of 35A and a peak h=1 current of 50A. The LLRF system primary task is to regulate the phase and amplitude of the RF gap voltage in order to maintain a smooth bunch with minimum peak current and a sufficient beam free gap to accommodate the extraction kicker rise time. Maintaining stable control of the cavity-beam system with such intense beam loading is non-trivial, and to do so, the LLRF system will use a combination of techniques including cavity voltage I&Q feedback, beam current feed-forward compensation, dynamic tuning and cycle to cycle adaptive feedback. This paper describes the progress on the LLRF control system to date.

Commissioning of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

This report describes in detail steps performed in bringing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) from the commissioning into the operational stage when collisions between 60 bunches of fully striped gold ions, were routinely provided. Corrections of the few power supply connections by beam measurements are described. Beam lifetime improvements at injection, along the acceleration are shown. The beam diagnostic results such as the Schottky detector, beam profile monitor, beam position monitors, the tune meter and others, are shown.

Neutralization of space charge forces using ionized background gas

The Tandem Van de Graaff at Brookhaven National Laboratory has delivered pulsed gold beam to the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and AGS Booster since 1992 for relativistic heavy ion physics. There is an ongoing effort to improve the quality and intensity of the negative ion beam delivered to the Tandem from the present Cs sputter sources. Because the beam energy is low (approximately 30 keV) and the current high, there are significant losses due to space charge forces. One of the ways being explored to overcome these losses is to neutralize the space charge forces with ionized background gas. On an ion source test bench, using three different gases (Ar, N2, and Xe), the percentage of current transported from the source to a downstream Faraday cup was increased from 10% to 40% by bleeding in gas. Bleeding in Xe resulted in the best transmission. The time dependence of the neutralization as a function of gas pressure was also observed. This system is presently being transferred to the Negative Ion I...