MUON IONIZATION COOLING EXPERIMENT: CONTROLS AND MONITORING

Abstract The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment is a demonstration experiment to prove the feasibility of cooling a beam of muons for use in a Neutrino Factory and/or Muon Collider. The MICE cooling channel will produce a 10% reduction in beam emittance which will be measured with a 1% resolution, and this level of precision requires strict controls and monitoring of all experimental parameters to minimize systematic errors. The MICE Controls and Monitoring system is based on EPICS and integrates with the DAQ, data monitoring systems, a conf guration database, and state machines for device operations. Run Control has been developed to ensure proper sequencing of equipment operations and use of system resources to protect data quality. State machines are used in test operations of cooling channel superconducting solenoids to set parameters for monitoring, alarms, and data archiving. A description of this system, its implementation and performance during both muon beam data collection and magnet training will be discussed

Recent Progress of RF Cavity Study at Mucool Test Area

In order to develop an RF cavity that is applicable for a muon beam cooling channel, a new facility, called Mucool Test Area (MTA) has been built at Fermilab. MTA is a unique facility whose purpose is to test RF cavities in various conditions. There are 201 and 805 MHz high power sources, a 4-Tesla solenoid magnet, a cryogenic system including a Helium liquifier, an explosion proof apparatus to operate gaseous/liquid Hydrogen, and a beam transport line to send an intense H- beam from the Fermilab Linac accelerator to the MTA hall. Recent activities at MTA will be discussed in this document.Comment: 4 pp. 13th International Workshop on Neutrino Factories, Superbeams and Beta beams (NuFact11) 1-6 Aug 2011: Geneva, Switzerlan

LLRF System for the Fermilab PIP-II Superconducting LINAC

PIP-II is an 800 MEV superconducting linac that is in the initial acceleration chain for the Fermilab accelerator complex. The RF system consists of a warm front-end with an ion source, RFQ and buncher cavities along with 25 superconducting cryo-modules comprised of five different acceleration $\beta$. The LLRF system for the LINAC has to provide field and resonance control for a total of 125 RF cavities.The LLRF system design is in the final design review phase and will enter the production phase next year. The PIP-II project is an international collaboration with various partner labs contributing subsystems. The LLRF system design for the PIP-II Linac is presented and the specification requirements and system performance in various stages of testing are described in this paper.Comment: Talk presented at LLRF Workshop 2023 (LLRF2023, arXiv: 2311.00900

Closed Loop Testing of Microphonics Algorithms Using a Cavity Emulator

An analog crystal filter based cavity emulator is modified with reverse biased varactor diodes to provide a tuning range of around 160 Hz. The piezo drive voltage of the resonance controller is used to detune the cavity through the bias voltage. A signal conditioning and summing circuit allows the introduction of microphonics disturbance from a signal source or using real microphonics data from cavity testing. This setup is used in closed loop with a cavity controller and resonance controller to study the effectiveness of resonance control algorithms suitable for superconducting cavities.Comment: Poster presented at LLRF Workshop 2023 (LLRF2023, arXiv: 2311.00901

The experimental program for high pressure gas filled radio frequency cavities for muon cooling channels

An intense beam of muons is needed to provide a luminosity on the order of 10(34) cm(-2)s(-1) for a multi-TeV collider. Because muons produced by colliding a multi-MW proton beam with a target made of carbon or mercury have a large phase space, significant six dimensional cooling is required. Through ionization cooling - the only cooling method that works within the lifetime of the muon - and emittance exchange, the desired emittances for a Higgs Factory or higher energy collider are attainable. A cooling channel utilizing gas filled radio frequency cavities has been designed to deliver the requisite cool muon beam. Technology development of these RF cavities has progressed from breakdown studies, through beam tests, to dielectric loaded and reentrant cavity designs. The results of these experiments are summarized

Pressurized H-2 rf Cavities in Ionizing Beams and Magnetic Fields

A major technological challenge in building a muon cooling channel is operating rf cavities in multitesla external magnetic fields. We report the first proof-of-principle experiment of a high pressure gas-filled rf cavity for use with intense ionizing beams and strong external magnetic fields. rf power consumption by beam-induced plasma is investigated with hydrogen and deuterium gases with pressures between 20 and 100 atm and peak rf gradients between 5 and 50 MV/m. The low pressure case agrees well with an analytical model based on electron and ion mobilities. Varying concentrations of oxygen gas are investigated to remove free electrons from the cavity and reduce the rf power consumption. Measurements of the electron attachment time to oxygen and rate of ion-ion recombination are also made. Additionally, we demonstrate the operation of the gas-filled rf cavity in a solenoidal field of up to 3 T, finding no major magnetic field dependence. All these results indicate that a high pressure gas-filled cavity is a viable technology for muon ionization cooling.open1

Pressurized rf cavities in ionizing beams

A muon collider or Higgs factory requires significant reduction of the six dimensional emittance of the beam prior to acceleration. One method to accomplish this involves building a cooling channel using high pressure gas filled radio frequency cavities. The performance of such a cavity when subjected to an intense particle beam must be investigated before this technology can be validated. To this end, a high pressure gas filled radio frequency (rf) test cell was built and placed in a 400 MeV beam line from the Fermilab linac to study the plasma evolution and its effect on the cavity. Hydrogen, deuterium, helium and nitrogen gases were studied. Additionally, sulfur hexafluoride and dry air were used as dopants to aid in the removal of plasma electrons. Measurements were made using a variety of beam intensities, gas pressures, dopant concentrations, and cavity rf electric fields, both with and without a 3 T external solenoidal magnetic field. Energy dissipation per electron-ion pair, electron-ion recombination rates, ion-ion recombination rates, and electron attachment times to SF6 and O-2 were measured.ope

Studies of Breakdown in a Pressurized RF Cavity

Microscopic images of the surfaces of metallic electrodes used in high-pressure gas-filled 805 MHz RF cavity experiments [1] have been used to investigate the mechanism of RF breakdown [2]. The images show evidence for melting and boiling in small regions of ∼10 micron diameter on tungsten, molybdenum, and beryllium electrode surfaces. In these experiments, the dense hydrogen gas in the cavity prevents electrons or ions from being accelerated to high enough energy to participate in the breakdown process so that the only important variables are the fields and the metallic surfaces. The distributions of breakdown remnants on the electrode surfaces are compared to the maximum surface gradient E predicted by an ANSYS model of the cavity. The local surface density of spark remnants, proportional to the probability of breakdown, shows a strong exponential dependence on the maximum gradient, which is reminiscent of Fowler-Nordheim behavior of electron emission from a cold cathode. New simulation results have shown good agreement with the breakdown behaviour of the hydrogen gas in the Paschen region and have suggested improved behaviour with the addition of trace dopants such as SF6 [3]. Present efforts are to extend the computer model to include electrode breakdown phenomena and to use scanning tunnelling microscopy to search for work function differences between the conditioned and unconditioned parts of the electrodes

Hadroproduction of the Chi1 and Chi2 States of Charmonium in 800 GeV/c Proton-Silicon Interactions

The cross sections for the hadroproduction of the Chi1 and Chi2 states of charmonium in proton-silicon collisions at sqrt{s}=38.8 GeV have been measured in Fermilab fixed target Experiment 771. The Chi states were observed via their radiative decay to J/psi+gamma, where the photon converted to e+e- in the material of the spectrometer. The measured values for the Chi1 and Chi2 cross sections for x_F>0 are 263+-69(stat)+-32(syst) and 498+-143(stat)+-67(syst) nb per nucleon respectively. The resulting sigma(Chi1}/sigma(Chi2) ratio of 0.53+-0.20(stat)+-0.07(syst), although somewhat larger than most theoretical expectations, can be accomodated by the latest theoretical estimates.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Measurement of Charged Pion Production Yields off the NuMI Target

The fixed-target MIPP experiment, Fermilab E907, was designed to measure the production of hadrons from the collisions of hadrons of momenta ranging from 5 to 120 GeV/c on a variety of nuclei. These data will generally improve the simulation of particle detectors and predictions of particle beam fluxes at accelerators. The spectrometer momentum resolution is between 3 and 4%, and particle identification is performed for particles ranging between 0.3 and 80 GeV/c using $dE/dx$, time-of-flight and Cherenkov radiation measurements. MIPP collected $1.42 \times10^6$ events of 120 GeV Main Injector protons striking a target used in the NuMI facility at Fermilab. The data have been analyzed and we present here charged pion yields per proton-on-target determined in bins of longitudinal and transverse momentum between 0.5 and 80 GeV/c, with combined statistical and systematic relative uncertainties between 5 and 10%.Comment: 15 pages, 13 figure