Study of the Transverse Emittance Blow-Up Along the Proton Synchrotron Booster Cycle During Wire Scanner Operation

Abstract

Transverse emittance measurements with wire scanners have been extensively studied across the accelerator complex at CERN due to their important role in characterizing the beams and their complicated modelling. In recent years, this topic has been of particular interest for the LHC Injectors Upgrade (LIU) project, where a tight transverse emittance blow-up budget between the Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB) and the Proton Synchrotron (PS) is imposed to ensure the required beam brightness for the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). In order to maintain a high brightness beam, any source of emittance blow-up along the PSB cycle needs to be identified and mitigated. While wire scanners have been mostly used at extraction energy in the PSB, they can also operate along the energy cycle. The scattering of the protons with the wire increases considerably at lower energies, leading to an overestimation of the beam emittance. In this proceeding we present the most recent studies, focusing on precisely quantifying the blow-up created by the flying wire with measurements in an optimized set-up and compared to $\texttt{FLUKA}$ simulations.