Software and hardware complex for monitoring the ion beam parameters of a particle accelerator

Abstract

This paper presents the development of an integrated system for monitoring the position of the ion beam in a particle accelerator. The effect of external disturbances and the imperfection of the accelerators themselves lead to the distortion of the ion beam trajectory in a cyclotron; therefore, constant monitoring and correction of the beam position is necessary. To control and correct the distortion of the ion beam trajectory in a cyclotron, an electrostatic sensor based on a pickup electrode is used as a meter. One of the features of the developed meter is that the estimation is carried out according to the second harmonic of the signal, allocated on a band-pass filter. This is due to the fact that during the accelerator work a large amount of noise is induced on pickup electrodes and the noise level at the fundamental frequency is high. The hardware and software complex converts the measured data obtained from the sensors, such as the transverse distribution of the beam energy, the beam current and the coordinates of its center of mass into an electrical signal, followed by their sampling in an analog-to-digital converter and the transmission of the measurement results through standard communication protocols and further processing in the LabView software. Using the received signals, the beam parameters such as the length of the ion bunch, the vertical beam position, and the acceleration phase are calculated for the corrector.