Performance of the resonant Schottky pickup at CSRe

Abstract

For a bunched beam, the signals on pickups are coherent, providing a signal power proportional to the square of the number of particles. For a coasting beam the individual particle signals have a random phase; therefore, the overall signal is proportional to the particle number N. As a consequence, Schottky signals are often relatively weak and have to compete with many noise sources. For a small number of particles, the S/N is always a problem. To achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio and better temporal resolution, which could yield important physical information about fast processes, a resonant pickup was developed at GSI (Nolden et al., 2011 [1]), and a similar device is now installed in the CSRe [2] at IMP. This device will be used for nuclear mass and lifetime measurement, as well as other uses. The final goal of the pickup is to detect single particles. In Dec 2012, we performed an experiment with a 112Sn50+ beam with an energy of 253MeV/u, and the single particle sensitivity of the pickup was successfully confirmed. This paper presents hardware measurements of the pickup as well as beam measurements.