Analysis of Femtosecond Electron Bunches at the SwissFEL Injector Test Facility

The SwissFEL (Swiss Free Electron Laser) is a free electron laser which is being built at the Paul Scherrer Institute. The SwissFEL will be a user facility to study processes on unexplored scales of space and time. In order to achieve these aims, X-ray pulses on the order of femtoseconds must be generated. For such short X-ray pulses, the electron bunch length must be comparable to the final X-ray pulse length. In order to achieve such a short electron bunch length, it must be monitored at every compression stage. This work proposes two novel methods to measure such electron bunches, namely a novel spectral method that analyses the frequency content of electron bunches that becomes easier with shorter bunch length and a transverse deflecting cavity method which can conceptually measure a zero bunch length. Because the SwissFEL was not built at the time of the PhD, all experiments were performed at the SwissFEL Injector Test Facility (SITF). The SITF is a 200 MeV test bed linear electron accelerator. Theoretically the bunch length is limited due to the uncorrelated energy spread and the higher order components of the bunch compressor. However, due to the limited electron energy in combination with the short electron bunches, space charge effects dominate the beam in the transverse phase space as well as in the longitudinal phase space. A transverse deflecting cavity (TDC) measurement was used to measure a reference bunch length to which the spectral fluctuations could be correlated. In a TDC the electric fields are oriented perpendicular to the beam direction and streaks the head and tail in opposite directions onto a screen. In a conventional TDC measurement, the projected beam size onto the temporal axis is the current profile, provided that the intrinsic beam size is small. However, in the SITF the intrinsic beam size was large due to the aforementioned space charge effects. This led to the development of a novel bunch length analysis method in a space charge dominated beam. In the proposed analysis method, a dispersive section in combination with a TDC was used to visualise the longitudinal phase space. The longitudinal phase space was sliced in the momentum domain to reveal the difference between the intrinsic and the streaked beam in a momentum slice. The bunch length could be extracted by recording the times for all slices. Both the simulations and experiments suggest the method enables the measurement of bunch length in a space charge dominated beam in which the transverse intrinsic beam size is large. The measured minimal bunch length from simulations and experiments are of the same order, 19.5 fs to 24.5 fs, respectively. Since the TDC at PSI has a specified resolution of 20 fs at 200 pC, this method may be used to reduce the resolution. The spectral content of femtosecond electron bunches contains electron bunch length information. As an electron beam collides with an optical transition radiation (OTR) foil, radiation is emitted. The radiation is collected by means of a mirror setup into an optical fibre and into an optical spectrometer. The spectral range of the spectrometer is 316 THz (950 nm) to 1364 THz (220 nm). From OTR theory a flat OTR spectrum was expected and measured. As the electron bunch length was reduced below 70 fs, periodic fluctuations started to appear on the spectra. These fluctuations broaden with decreasing bunch length and show a good agreement with the bunch length measured with the TDC.

High Intensity Beam Issues in the CERN Proton Synchrotron

Sandra Aumon

This PhD work is about limitations of high intensity proton beams observed in the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) and, in particular, about issues at injection and transition energies. With its 53 years, the CERN PS would have to operate beyond the limit of its performance to match the future requirements. Beam instabilities driven by transverse impedance and aperture restrictions are important issues for the operation and for the High-Luminosity LHC upgrade which foresees an intensity increase delivered by the injectors. The main subject of the thesis concerns the study of a fast transverse instability occurring at transition energy. The proton beams crossing this energy range are particularly sensitive to wake forces because of the slow synchrotron motion. This instability can cause a strong vertical emittance blow-up and severe losses in less than a synchrotron period. Experimental observations show that the particles at the peak density of the beam longitudinal distribution oscillate in the vertical plane due to a short range wake field and following a travelling wave of about 700 MHz. In order to perform measurements, a dedicated single bunch beam was set up with a zero chromaticity plateau around transition energy. Extensive measurements were performed of the dynamics of instability in order to compute rise times and intensity thresholds. These measurements were done for several peak densities and the results show that the longer the bunch length, the higher is the threshold in intensity. Other measurements performed with a small negative chromaticity and another working point show that the intensity threshold can be pushed at higher values—in this case, the threshold was increased by 20%. The particularity of this work is that the instability is triggered during the acceleration. At transition energy, the momentum compaction factor is zero and the exchange of particles between the head and the tail of the beam from synchrotron motion, which is a natural way to damp instabilities, vanishes for few turns. Therefore the measurements at which η the instability is triggered are fundamental to know in which longitudinal regime the instability develops. Macro particle simulations were performed in order reproduce the dynamics of the instability with the HEADTAIL code, that simulates the beam interaction with the impedance of the machine. In the case of the PS, a very detailed impedance model does not exist, therefore a very simple resonator impedance was considered. The parameters of the code were adapted in order to simulate the beam as close as possible to the experimental conditions. The simulations showed that the travelling wave is well reproduced and therefore rise times were extracted for different beam intensities and compared to the measurements. A good agreement is found for a such simple impedance model. The intensity thresholds are reproduced for zero chromaticity within 30% and it is clear that some damping mechanisms occurring in the measurements are not reproduced by the code. In particular, octupolar components of the field, non-linear coupling and transverse space charge are not taken into account. These limitations could cause some discrepancies between model and measurements. This study allows to establish a broadband impedance model which can be use to predict the dynamics of the instability. A few experiments were done also with the use a gamma transition jump. In this case, the instability appears in the adiabatic regime and the rising of the instability is following the peak density of the beam. Both the intensity threshold measurements and the simulations show that the gamma jump is by far the most efficient way to increase significantly the intensity threshold. The choice of adequate working point appears also to be a cure of the instability. This study with the support of measurements provides a rough impedance model confirmed by simulations and an understanding of the different mechanisms triggering the instability. The last part of the thesis is dedicated to proton beam losses studies at injection energy. An eventual upgrade of the high intensity beam is limited by large beam losses at injection in the PS. Losses were measured with the current beam loss monitor system of the PS that they occur while the incoming beam enters in the machine and then during several hundred turns while the beam is circulating. Optics measurements were performed to check the mismatch of the transfer line between the PSBooster and the PS. A significant horizontal dispersion mismatch was found and in particular a difference in optics between the four injection lines of the PS. Aperture bottlenecks were found at the injection septum in both transverse planes and at the maximum of the injection bump. With the help of Monte Carlo simulations, the high radiation outside the ring induced by the losses was understood. However, the mismatch does not explain the continuous losses after the beam is injected. A possible explanation is that the space charge forces contribute to make particles cross resonances and are lost while they are oscillating at high amplitudes. The transverse phase space is refilled due to the combination of the synchrotron motion and space charge. Several solutions were proposed to improve the situation. A new optics of the transfer line and at injection could make the beam size smaller. Some special quadrupoles already installed in the PS could be used to adapt the optics of the incoming beam. Increase the injection energy from 1.4 GeV to 2 GeV kinetic would cause a gain of 65% in space charge forces, and these studies are currently ongoing for the upgrade of the PS in the framework of high-intensity LHC upgrade project. High intensity beams are also perturbed by space charge forces and transverse instabilities. Coherent tune shift measurements were performed at injection and extraction in order to evaluate the transverse imaginary part of the impedance and the contribution of the space charge to betatron frequency shift with the beam intensity.

EPFL2012

New Capabilities of the FLUKA Multi-Purpose Code

Francesco Cerutti, Nikolaos Charitonidis, André Donadon Servelle, Philippe Jean Schoofs

FLUKA is a general purpose Monte Carlo code able to describe the transport and interaction of any particle and nucleus type in complex geometries over an energy range extending from thermal neutrons to ultrarelativistic hadron collisions. It has many different applications in accelerator design, detector studies, dosimetry, radiation protection, medical physics, and space research. In 2019, CERN and INFN, as FLUKA copyright holders, together decided to end their formal collaboration framework, allowing them henceforth to pursue different pathways aimed at meeting the evolving requirements of the FLUKA user community, and at ensuring the long term sustainability of the code. To this end, CERN set up the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration (1) . This paper illustrates the physics processes that have been newly released or are currently implemented in the code distributed by the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration (2) under new licensing conditions that are meant to further facilitate access to the code, as well as intercomparisons. The description of coherent effects experienced by high energy hadron beams in crystal devices, relevant to promising beam manipulation techniques, and the charged particle tracking in vacuum regions subject to an electric field, overcoming a former lack, have already been made available to the users. Other features, namely the different kinds of low energy deuteron interactions as well as the synchrotron radiation emission in the course of charged particle transport in vacuum regions subject to magnetic fields, are currently undergoing systematic testing and benchmarking prior to release. FLUKA is widely used to evaluate radiobiological effects, with the powerful support of the Flair graphical interface, whose new generation (Available at http://flair.cem) offers now additional capabilities, e.g., advanced 3D visualization with photorealistic rendering and support for industry-standard volume visualization of medical phantoms. FLUKA has also been playing an extensive role in the characterization of radiation environments in which electronics operate. In parallel, it has been used to evaluate the response of electronics to a variety of conditions not included in radiation testing guidelines and standards for space and accelerators, and not accessible through conventional ground level testing. Instructive results have been obtained from Single Event Effects (SEE) simulations and benchmarks, when possible, for various radiation types and energies. The code has reached a high level of maturity, from which the FLUKA.CERN Collaboration is planning a substantial evolution of its present architecture. Moving towards a modern programming language allows to overcome fundamental constraints that limited development options. Our long term goal, in addition to improving and extending its physics performances with even more rigorous scientific oversight, is to modernize its structure to integrate independent contributions more easily and to formalize quality assurance through state-of-the-art software deployment techniques. This includes a continuous integration pipeline to automatically validate the codebase as well as automatic processing and analysis of a tailored physics-case test suite. With regard to the aforementioned objectives, several paths are currently envisaged, like finding synergies with Geant4, both at the core structure and interface level, this way offering the user the possibility to run with the same input different Monte Carlo codes and crosscheck the results.

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Electron Cloud and Synchrotron Radiation characterization of technical surfaces with the Large Hadron Collider Vacuum Pilot Sector

Elena Buratin

This PhD thesis presents the experimental study on electron cloud (EC) and synchrotron radiation (SR) phenomena affecting the LHC storage ring performance. These phenomena are one of the major issues of the LHC storage ring, generating beam instabilities, pressure rise and heat loads on the beam pipes. This experimental study is carried out with an innovative system installed in a room temperature and field free section of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Vacuum Pilot Sector (VPS). ln this system, several surfaces are simultaneously tested, in particular standard copper, amorphous carbon coating, NEG. Thanks to a wide spectrum of detectors, the EC and SR signals were studied as a function of beam parameters and beam pipe properties. The EC behaviour increases linearly with the number of bunches and bunch population above the multipacting threshold. This phenomenon increases linearly also with the bunch length for the Long Straight Sections of LHC (LSS). As expected, the bunch spacing has a crucial importance on the formation of EC dynamic: the 50 ns filling scheme avoids the multipacting effect at 450 GeV. At 6.5 TeV the photoelectron contribution is visible, with no multipacting. This scheme is not sufficient for the LHC collision studies and cannot be used as standard filling scheme. Instead, the 25 ns bunch spacing scheme suffers of EC; in this case this phenomenon can be drastically reduced only by bombarding the surface with electrons during dedicated scrubbing runs, or thanks to the installation of beam pipe surface with a low SEY, such as the amorphous-carbon coating. The measurements performed with pick-ups show the evolution of the EC dynamics for the first time in the LHC. The energy spectrum detectors and the gas analysers were also installed for the first time in the LHC history: the electron cloud spectrum and the gas composition could be measured during the machine operation. The electron energy spectrum evidences a peak at around 100 eV, corresponding to the accelerated electrons responsible for multipacting. The gas analysers measured the main gasses present in the LHC ultra-high vacuum system, such as methane, carbon dioxide and monoxide, water, hydrogen and traces of 2-Propynenitrile 3-fluoro (C3FN), probably linked to the effect of radiation into the kapton cables. It has been possible to estimate the Electron Stimulated Desorption (ESD) parameter of a copper surface as a function of the accumulated electron dose. The heat loads due to impedance, EC and SR were measured and, finally, the operation of HL-LHC machine has been estimated in terms of electron current, pressure and power deposition thanks to the results of this study. Doubling of the bunch population will increase the electron current and the pressure of one order of magnitude, while the deposited power due to EC will be smaller than 1 W/mchamber for a beam pipe SEY lower than 1.8.

EPFL2020