Parasitic slow extraction of extremely weak beam from a high-intensity proton rapid cycling synchrotron

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method to extract extremely weak beam from a high-intensity proton rapid cycling synchrotron (RCS) in the parasitic mode, while maintaining the normal fast extraction. The usual slow extraction method from a synchrotron by employing third-order resonance cannot be applied in a high-intensity RCS due to a very short flat-top at the extraction energy and the strict control on beam loss. The proposed parasitic slow extraction method moves the beam to scrape a scattering foil prior to the fast beam extraction by employing either a local orbit bump or momentum deviation or their combination, so that the halo part of the beam will be scattered. A part of the scattered particles will be extracted from the RCS and guided to the experimental area. The slow extraction process can last about a few milliseconds before the beam is extracted by the fast extraction system. The method has been applied to the RCS of China Spallation Neutron Source. With 1.6GeV in the extraction energy, 62.5μA in the average current and 25Hz in the repetition rate for the RCS, the proton intensity by the slow extraction method can be up to 2×104 protons per cycle or 5×105 protons per second. The extracted beam has also a good time structure of approximately uniform in a spill which is required for many applications such as detector tests. Detailed studies including the scattering effect in the foil, the local orbit bump by the bump magnets and dispersive orbit bump by modifying the RF pattern, the multi-particle simulations by ORBIT and TURTLE codes, and some technical features for the extraction magnets are presented.