Pavel Belochitskii

The CERN antiproton decelerator (AD) in 2002: status, progress and machine development results

After 3 years of operation, the antiproton decelerator performance is close to the design specifications. A review of the improvements over the years is given, along with results of machine development sessions that have taken place at regular intervals. An outlook for 2003 with details of planned and possible changes is also presented.

The ELENA facility

The CERN Antiproton Decelerator (AD) provides antiproton beams with a kinetic energy of 5.3 MeV to an active user community. The experiments would profit from a lower beam energy, but this extraction energy is the lowest one possible under good conditions with the given circumference of the AD. The Extra Low Energy Antiproton ring (ELENA) is a small synchrotron with a circumference a factor of 6 smaller than the AD to further decelerate antiprotons from the AD from 5.3 MeV to 100 keV. Controlled deceleration in a synchrotron equipped with an electron cooler to reduce emittances in all three planes will allow the existing AD experiments to increase substantially their antiproton capture efficiencies and render new experiments possible. ELENA ring commissioning is taking place at present and first beams to a new experiment installed in a new experimental area are foreseen in 2017. The transfer lines from ELENA to existing experiments in the old experimental area will be installed during CERN Long Shutdown 2 (LS2) in 2019 and 2020. The status of the project and ring commissioning will be reported. This article is part of the Theo Murphy meeting issue ‘Antiproton physics in the ELENA era’.

Report on Operation of Antiproton Decelerator

The Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN operates for physics since 1999. The 3.5 GeV/c antiprotons produced in the target by a 26 GeV/c proton beam coming from CERN PS. Since the experiments need a low energy antiprotons, beam is decelerated in the AD down to an extraction momentum of 100 MeV/c. Due to significant emittance blow up during deceleration, as well as tight requirements from experiments on extracted beam sizes, efficient compression of beam phase space is indispensable. Two cooling systems, stochastic and electron are used in AD. The progress in machine performance is reviewed, along with plans for the future. Special emphasis is given to the proposed new extra low energy antiproton ring (ELENA) for deceleration of antiproton beam further down to an energy of 100 keV (momentum 13.7 MeV/c), which would allow much higher antiproton capture rate with significantly higher beam density.

Beam optics issues for the antiproton decelerator

The deceleration of the beam down to 0.1 GeV/c in the ring previously used as Antiproton Collector (AC) at 3.5 GeV/c, requires a number of modifications to the lattice. The insertion of the electron cooling, needed to cool the antiproton beam at low energy, implies the re-arrangement of quadrupoles. The optical functions then need to be readjusted in order to keep the large acceptance and to cope with the electron and stochastic cooling environment. Calculations of the linear optics and of the acceptance are reported. Tests of beam deceleration in the AC show the need for closed-orbit correction at low momentum in addition to the static correction by the movement of the quadrupoles available in the present configuration. The deceleration tests will be discussed and a correction system, which includes trim supplies on the main bending magnets, will be described.