Increased Intensity Performance of the Brookhaven AGS

Abstract

With the advent of H- injection into the Brookhaven AGS, circulating beams of up to 3 × 1013 protons at 200 MeV have been obtained. Rf capture of 2.2 × 1013 and acceleration of 1.73 × 1013 up to the transition energy (? 8 GeV) and 1.64 × 1013 to full energy (? 29 GeV) has been achieved. This represents a 50% increase over the best performance obtained with H+ injection. The increase in circulation beam current is obtained without filling the horizontal aperture. This allows the rf capture process to utilize a larger longitudinal phase space area (? 1 eV sec/bunch vs ? 0.6 eV sec with H+ operation). The resulting reduction in relative longitudinal density partially offsets the increase in space charge effects at higher currents. In order to make the capture process independent of injected beam current, a dynamic beam loading compensation loop was installed on the AGS rf system. This is the only addition to the synchrotron itself that was required to reach the new intensity records. A discussion of injection, the rf capture process, and space charge effects is presented.