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The current electron cooler at the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) at CERN was built in the second half of the 1970s and is thus well over 40 years old. It was built for the Initial Cooling Experiment (ICE) where stochastic and electron cooling were tested to ascertain the feasibility of using these techniques to generate high intensity antiproton beams for the SPpS. The ICE electron cooler was subsequently upgraded and installed in LEAR (Low Energy Antiproton Ring) to help generate intense beams of antiprotons at low energies. After the stop of the antiproton physics at LEAR in 1996 and two years of studies of electron cooling of Pb ions, the electron cooler was moved to the AD where it has been in use ever since. With the new ELENA ring becoming operational, a major consolidation project has been launched to extend the life of the AD and as a part of this a new electron cooler for the AD is being built. In this paper, we describe some of the design considerations and challenges of this project as well as the expected gains in terms of cooling performance., Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Beam Cooling and Related Topics, COOL2021, Novosibirsk, Russia

Diffraction radiation (DR) is produced when a relativistic charged particle moves in the vicinity of a medium. The electric field of the charged particle polarizes the target atoms which then oscillate, emitting radiation with a very broad spectrum. The spatial-spectral properties of DR are sensitive to a range of electron beam parameters. Furthermore, the energy loss due to DR is so small that the electron beam parameters are unchanged. Therefore DR can be used to develop non-invasive diagnostic tools. The aim of this project is to measure the transverse (vertical) beam size using incoherent DR. To achieve the micron-scale resolution required by CLIC, DR in UV and X-ray spectral-range must be investigated. During the next few years, experimental validation of such a scheme will be conducted on the CesrTA at Cornell University, USA. Here we present the current status of the experiment preparation.

Since several years, CERN is studying the feasibility of building a high energy e+ e- linear collider: the CLIC (Compact LInear Collider). One of the challenges of such a collider is the pre-alignment precision and accuracy requirement on the transverse positions of the linac components, which is typically 14 μm over a window of 200 m. To ensure the possibility of positioning within such tight constraints, CERN Beams Department’s Survey team has worked intensively at developing the methods and technology needed to achieve that objective. This paper describes activities which were performed on a test bench (mock-up) with five degrees of freedom (DOF) for the qualification of control algorithms for the CLIC supporting system active-pre-alignment. Present understanding, lessons learned (“know how”), issues of sensors noise and mechanical components nonlinearities are presented.

In the framework of the LHC Injectors Upgrade project (LIU) the PS Booster (PSB) will undergo in depth consolidation and upgrade programs [1]. The aim is increasing the extraction energy to 2 GeV, exploiting the potential of Linac4 and allowing reliable operations during the next 25 years. For the RF system, substantial improvements could come from the replacement of the existing narrowband, tuned systems covering the h=1 and h=2 frequency ranges (0.6 ÷ 1.8 MHz and 1.2 ÷ 3.6 MHz respectively) with wideband (0.5 ÷ 4 MHz) Finemet® loaded cavities. The new system would be modular, allow multi-harmonic operation, use solid-state power stages and include fast RF feedback to compensate beam loading effects to some extent. A proof of principle system providing ≈3.0 kV accelerating voltage has been designed, constructed and installed in one of the PSB rings. This paper provides details on the design and measurements as well as information on the project status.

A project to install collimators in the dispersion suppressor regions of the LHC was launched early 2010, aiming to reduce the power deposition in superconducting magnets by a factor of 10. To be placed in the continuous arc cryostat, the design of such collimators had to comply with challenging integration, functional and time constraints. A pre-study for a cold collimator solution was launched in parallel with an alternative design consisting of a room temperature collimator and a cryogenic bypass. The second was eventually preferred, as it was based on proven LHC technologies for cryogenic, vacuum, electrical and collimator material solutions, despite the increased difficulty on the mechanical integration and assembly. This paper presents the mechanical design of a cryogenic bypass for the LHC continuous cryostat andrespective collimator unit, both made to comply with the functionality of existing LHC systems. The approach taken to achieve a reliable design within schedule will be explained alongside the measures adopted to validate new solutions, in particular, when dealing with welding distortions, systems routing, thermal loads and precision mechanics.

The active pre-alignment of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) is one of the key points of the project: the components must be pre-aligned w.r.t. a straight line within a few microns over a sliding window of 200 m, along the two linacs of 20 km each. The proposed solution consists of stretched wires of more than 200 m, overlapping over half of their length, which will be the reference of alignment. Wire Positioning Sensors (WPS), coupled to the supports to be pre-aligned, will perform precise and accurate measurements within a few microns w.r.t. these wires. A micrometric fiducialisation of the components and a micrometric alignment of the components on common supports will make the strategy of pre-alignment complete. In this paper, the global strategy of active pre-alignment is detailed and illustrated by the latest results demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed solution.

The CLIC study is based on the so-called two-beam acceleration concept and one of the main goals of the CLIC Test Facility 3 is to demonstrate the efficiency of the CLIC RF power production scheme. As part of this facility a Test Beam Line (TBL), presently under commissioning, is a small-scale version of a CLIC decelerator. To perform as expected the beam line must show efficient and stable RF power production over 16 consecutive decelerating structures. As the high intensity electron beam is decelerated its energy spread grows by up to 60 %. A novel segmented beam dump for time resolved energy measurements has been designed to match the requirements of the TBL. As a complement, a diffusive OTR screen is also installed in the same spectrometer line. The combination of these two devices will provide both a high spatial resolution measurement of both the energy and energy spread and a measurement with a few nanoseconds time response. This paper describes the design of the new segmented dump and presents the results from the first commissioning of the TBL spectrometer line.

The high charge (>6μC) electron beams produced in the CLIC Test Facility 3 (CTF3) is accelerated in fully loaded cavities. Leading to a strong transient effect, the time evolution of the beam energy and its energy spread must be measured with at least 50MHz bandwidth. Three different detectors have been installed and tested so far on the three existing spectrometer lines of the machine: a secondary emission wire grid, a segmented beam dump and a segmented photomultiplier tube observing OTR emissions. This contribution describes the three devices and gives a comparison of the relative performances.

Studies are going on of a new wire scanner concept. All moving parts are inside the beam vacuum and it is specified for use in all the machines across the CERN accelerator complex. Key components have been developed and tested. Work is now focussing on the installation of a prototype for test in the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator. This article presents the specification of the device and constraints on the design for integration in the different accelerators at CERN. The design issues of the mechanical components are discussed and optimisation work shown. Finally, the prototype design, integrating the several components into the vacuum tank is presented.

The power source of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) relies on the generation and deceleration of a high-intensity electron drive beam. In order to provide the best radio-frequency (RF) to beam-energy transfer efficiency, the electron beam is accelerated using fully loaded RF cavities, which leads to strong beam loading effects resulting in a high-energy transient. The stability of the RF power produced by the drive beam depends on the stability of the drive beam energy and energy spread along the pulse. The control and the monitoring of the time evolution of the beam energy distribution are therefore crucial for the accelerator performance. For this purpose segmented beam dumps, which are simple and robust devices, have been designed and installed at the CLIC Test Facility 3 (CTF3). These devices are located at the end of spectrometer lines and provide horizontal beam profiles with a time resolution better than 10 ns. The segmented dumps are composed of parallel, vertical, metallic plates, and are based on the same principle as a Faraday cup: the impinging beam current is read by a fast acquisition channel. Both FLUKA and Geant4 simulations were performed to define the optimum detector geometry for beam energies ranging from 5 MeV to 150 MeV. This paper presents a detailed description of the different steps of the design: the optimization of the detector spatial resolution, the minimization of the thermal load and the long-term damage resulting from high radiation doses. Four segmented dumps are currently used in the CTF3 complex. Their measured performance and limitations are presented in this paper. Typical beam spectra as measured in the CTF3 linac are also presented along with a description of the RF manipulations needed for tuning the beam energy spectrum. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.