Tom Powers

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.

RF Conditioning and Testing of Fundamental Power Couplers for SNS Superconducting Cavity Production

The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) makes use of 33 medium beta (0.61) and 48 high beta (0.81) superconducting cavities. Each cavity is equipped with a fundamental power coupler, which should withstand the full klystron power of 550 kW in full reflection for the duration of an RF pulse of 1.3 msec at 60 Hz repetition rate. Before assembly to a superconducting cavity, the vacuum components of the coupler are submitted to acceptance procedures consisting of preliminary quality assessments, cleaning and clean room assembly, vacuum leak checks and baking under vacuum, followed by conditioning and RF high power testing. Similar acceptance procedures (except clean room assembly and baking) were applied for the airside components of the coupler. All 81 fundamental power couplers for SNS superconducting cavity production have been RF power tested at JLAB Newport News and, beginning in April 2004 at SNS Oak Ridge. This paper gives details of coupler processing and RF high power-assessed performances.

Performance experience with the CEBAF SRF cavities

The full complement of 169 pairs of niobium superconducting cavities has been installed in the CEBAF accelerator. This paper surveys the performance characteristics of these cavities in vertical tests, commissioning in the tunnel, and operational experience to date. Although installed performance exceeds specifications, and 3.2 GeV beam has been delivered on target, present systems do not consistently preserve the high performance obtained in vertical dewar tests as operational capability. The principal sources of these limitations are discussed.

SNS cryomodule performance

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerating Facility, Jefferson Lab, is producing 24 Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) cryomodules for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) cold linac. This includes one medium-/spl beta/ (0.61) prototype, 11 medium-/spl beta/ production, and 12 high beta (0.81) production cryomodules. After testing, the medium-/spl beta/ prototype cryomodule was shipped to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and acceptance check out has been completed. All production orders for cavities and cryomodule components are being received at this time and the medium-/spl beta/ cryomodule production run has started. Each of the medium-/spl beta/ cryomodules is scheduled to undergo complete operational performance testing at Jefferson Laboratory before shipment to ORNL. The performance results of cryomodules to date will be discussed.

Overview of SNS Cryomodule Performance

Thomas Jefferson National Accelerating Facility (Jefferson Lab) has completed production of 24 Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) cryomodules for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) superconducting linac. This includes one medium-β (0.61) prototype, eleven medium-β and twelve high-β (0.81) production cryomodules. Nine medium-β cryomodules as well as two high-β cryomodules have undergone complete operational performance testing in the Cryomodule Test Facility at Jefferson Lab. The set of tests includes measurements of maximum gradient, unloaded Q (Q0), microphonics, and response to Lorentz forces. The Qext’s of the various couplers are measured and the behavior of the higher order mode couplers is examined. The mechanical and piezo tuners are also characterized. The results of these performance tests will be discussed in this paper.

Improvement of the noise figure of the CEBAF switched electrode electronics BPM system

The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) is a high-intensity continuous wave electron accelerator for nuclear physics located at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. A beam energy of 4 GeV is achieved by recirculating the electron beam five times through two anti-parallel 400 MeV linacs. In the linacs, where there is recirculated beam, the BPM specifications must be met for beam intensities between 1 and 1,000 {micro}A. To avoid a complete redesign of existing electronics, they investigated ways to improve the noise figure of the linac BPM switched electrode electronics (SEE) so that they could be used in the transport lines. This paper will focus on the source of the excessive out-of-band noise and how it was reduced. The development, commissioning and operational results of this low-noise variant of the linac style SEE BPMs as well as techniques for determining the noise figure of the RF chain will also be presented.

Study on transient beam loading compensation for China ADS proton linac injector II

Significant transient beam loading effects were observed during beam commissioning tests of prototype II of the injector for the accelerator driven sub-critical(ADS) system, which took place at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, between October and December 2014. During these tests experiments were performed with continuous wave(CW) operation of the cavities with pulsed beam current, and the system was configured to make use of a prototype digital low level radio frequency(LLRF) controller. The system was originally operated in pulsed mode with a simple proportional plus integral and deviation(PID) feedback control algorithm,which was not able to maintain the desired gradient regulation during pulsed 10 m A beam operations. A unique simple transient beam loading compensation method which made use of a combination of proportional and integral(PI) feedback and feedforward control algorithm was implemented in order to significantly reduce the beam induced transient effect in the cavity gradients. The superconducting cavity field variation was reduced to less than 1.7% after turning on this control algorithm. The design and experimental results of this system are presented in this paper.

Two Applications of Direct Digital Down Converters in Beam Diagnostics

The technologies of direct digital down converters, digital frequency synthesis, and digital signal processing are being used in many commercial applications. Because of this commercialization, the component costs are being reduced to the point where they are economically viable for large scale accelerator applications. This paper will discuss two applications of these technologies to beam diagnostics. In the first application the combination of direct digital frequency synthesis and direct digital down converters are coupled with digital signal processor technology in order to maintain the stable gain environment required for a multi-electrode beam position monitoring system. This is done by injecting a CW reference signal into the electronics as part of the front-end circuitry. In the second application direct digital down converters are used to provide a novel approach to the measurement of beam intensity using cavity current monitors. In this system a pair of reference signals are injected into the cavity through an auxiliary port. The beam current is then calculated as the ratio of the beam signal divided by the average of the magnitude of the two reference signals.

A vertical test system for China-ADS project injector II superconducting cavities

To test superconducting cavities, a vertical test system has been designed and set up at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP). The system design is based on VCO-PLL hardware and the NI Labview software. The test of the HWR010#2 superconducting cavity shows that the function of this test system is satisfactory for testing the low frequency cavity.

Jefferson Lab’s Distributed Data Acquisition

Jefferson Lab’s Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) occasionally experiences fast intermittent beam instabilities that are difficult to isolate and result in downtime. The Distributed Data Acquisition (Dist DAQ) system is being developed to detect and quickly locate such instabilities. It will consist of multiple Ethernet based data acquisition chassis distributed throughout the seven‐eighths of a mile CEBAF site. Each chassis will monitor various control system signals that are only available locally and/or monitored by systems with small bandwidths that cannot identify fast transients. The chassis will collect data at rates up to 40 Msps in circular buffers that can be frozen and unrolled after an event trigger. These triggers will be derived from signals such as periodic timers or accelerator faults and be distributed via a custom fiber optic event trigger network. This triggering scheme will allow all the data acquisition chassis to be triggered simultaneously and provide a snapshot ...