Use of an active wire Bθ cell for electron beam conditioning

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The propagation of intense, relativistic electron beams in air is subject to the resistive hose instability. Conditioning the beam prior to injecting it into the air can extend its range by reducing the hose growth rate and by reducing the initial spatial perturbations that seed the hose instability. Experiments have been performed using the SuperIBEX accelerator (Ipeak=10–30 kA, E=4.5 MeV, 40 ns full width at half-maximum) to develop conditioning cells that suppress the hose. This paper describes the performance of an active wire Bθ cell that is used in conjunction with an ion focused regime (IFR) cell. The IFR cell detunes the instability by producing a head-to-tail radius taper on the beam. The wire cell maintains this radius taper while producing an emittance taper that is necessary to suppress the hose growth. In addition, the wire cell reduces the initial beam perturbations through the anharmonic centering force associated with the wire current and its azimuthal magnetic field Bθ. The ability of the Bθ cell to reduce the beam offset with a minimal increase in the beam radius gives it several advantages over the use of a simple, thick scattering foil to perform the radius taper to emittance taper conversion. The SuperIBEX beam propagation distance, in terms of the betatron oscillation scale length, was extended to ∼10λβ using these cells.