Reconstruction of Initial Beam Conditions at the Exit of the DARHT II Accelerator

Abstract

We consider a technique of determining the initial beam conditions of the DARHT II accelerator by measuring the beam size under three different magnetic transport settings. This may be time gated to resolve the parameters as a function of time within the 2000 nsec pulse. This technique leads to three equations in three unknowns with solution giving the accelerator exit beam radius, tilt, and emittance. We find that systematic errors cancel and so are not a problem in the initial beam condition unfolding. Random uncorrelated shot to shot errors can be managed by one of three strategies: (1) make the transport system optically de-magnifying; (2) average over many individual shots; or (3) make the random uncorrelated shot to shot errors sufficiently small. The high power of the DARHT II beam requires that the beam transport system leading to a radius measuring apparatus be optically magnifying. This means that the shot to shot random errors must either be made small (less than about 1%) or that we average each of the three beam radius determinations over many individual shots. We find that for the anticipated DARHT II beam parameters that 60 to 120 shots should be sufficient to determine the accelerator beam parameters.