Beam scrubbing of beam pipes during the first commissioning of SuperKEKB

Abstract

The first (Phase-1) commissioning of SuperKEKB—an electron-positron collider with asymmetric energies located at KEK, in Tsukuba, Japan—started in February 2016, after more than five years of upgrading work on KEKB, and successfully ended in June of the same year. This paper describes one major task of Phase-1 commissioning: beam scrubbing the surface of the beam pipes, to prepare them for a sufficiently long beam lifetime and low background noise in the next commissioning, when a new particle detector will be installed. The pressure rises per unit beam current (dP/dI [Pa A−1]) were continuously monitored, and the coefficient of photon-stimulated desorption (PSD), η [molecules photon−1], was evaluated in the arc sections. The value of η decreased steadily with the beam dose, as expected. For arc sections in the positron ring, where most of the beam pipes were newly fabricated, the decrease in η against the photon dose (D) was similar to that previously reported; that is: η∝D−0.5∼0.8. At high storage beam currents, the evolution of η was affected by gas desorption resulting from the multipacting of electrons—that is, the electron cloud effect (ECE), which is a phenomenon particular to high-intensity positron rings. For the arc sections in the electron ring, η also decreased smoothly with the photon dose D, approximately as ∝ D−0.8. Given that most of these beam pipes were reused from KEKB, the value of η was much lower than that of the positron ring, and also lower than that of the electron ring of KEKB from the early stages of D. This implies that the surface of the reused beam pipes remembered the conditions in the KEKB, which is a known memory effect. The results obtained for η are compared with those obtained in various other accelerators.