Miriam Brosi

For the development of new synchrotron light sources, new operation modes are considered. For a successful application of these schemes, however, an understanding of the effects involved is essential. The KIT storage ring, Karlsruhe Research Accelerator (KARA), allows the implementation of new operating modes, including tests using a variety of high-performance beam diagnostics devices. Negative momentum compaction optics has been established at KARA at various beam energies. Systematic studies of the resulting beam dynamics showed significant differences to the dynamics at equivalent positive momentum compaction factors. Moreover, a longitudinal instability occurs at low absolute values of the momentum compaction factor, caused by coherent synchrotron radiation, which is the dominant longitudinal impedance at KARA. This work outlines the status of the operation with negative momentum compaction factors at KARA and presents the current-dependent bunch length at negative momentum compaction. Furthermore, the observation of the instability and its dynamics, including significant deviations from threshold predictions, is shown and compared to the equivalent instability at positive momentum compaction.

Precise diagnostic on the electron beam parameters is a very valuable tool and essential in the operation of synchrotron light sources. One possible option is to employ the emitted synchrotron radiation for non-destructive measurements. A tool, which has been used in many ring-based synchrotron light sources is Time-Correlated Single-Photon Counting (TCSPC). It allows to measure the arrival time distribution of the emitted photons and, by that, reveals the filling pattern, i.e., the charge distribution onto the electron bunches stored in the storage ring. At MAX IV, two TCSPC setups were installed and the analysis was extended to also allow for the measurement of the longitudinal profiles of the individual bunches. The analysis is available as a Tango device in the accelerator control system and continuously provides, for example, the bunch length of each bunch as well as the bunch profiles and phases. This improved the diagnostic capabilities significantly, for example, in the presence of Landau cavities, which are becoming increasingly more common in new fourth-generation synchrotron light sources.

In the case of a single-digit picosecond bunch length, synchrotron light sources produce intense coherent radiation up to the THz range. The reduction of the bunch length by lowering the momentum compaction factor (low- α ) gives rise to the microbunching instability, which is on the one hand a crucial roadblock in the x-ray range during to the resulting effective bunch lengthening, but on the other hand also an opportunity for the generation of intense THz radiation if it can be controlled appropriately. In the KIT storage ring KARA (Karlsruhe Research Accelerator), two parallel plates with periodic rectangular corrugations are planned to be installed as a proof of principle in an electron storage ring. These plates create an additional longitudinal impedance based on their geometry, which can affect the beam dynamics. The resulting impedance manipulation will be used to study and control the longitudinal electron beam dynamics and the emitted coherent synchrotron radiation. This paper presents the results of systematic studies in simulation of the impact of additional corrugated plate impedances on the longitudinal beam dynamics using the example of the KARA storage ring. If the periodicity of the wake function of the corrugated plates matches the size of the substructures in the longitudinal bunch profile, the instability threshold can be effectively manipulated. This extends intense THz radiation to different beam current regimes. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

At the 3 GeV ring of the MAX IV Laboratory, a fourth-generation ring-based synchrotron light source, an asymmetric influence of the sign of the amplitude-dependent tune shift (ADTS) on the transverse mode-coupling instability has been observed. Measurements of the instability, in dedicated single-bunch experiments at low chromaticity, revealed a significant dependence of the dynamics of the instability above threshold on the sign of the ADTS. While for a negative sign of the ADTS, the crossing of the instability does not lead to a loss of beam current, a positive sign results in the loss of 40% or more of the beam current at the threshold. In order to investigate the observed asymmetry, the systematic measurement of beam dynamics above the threshold has been conducted in combination with particle tracking simulations with 2 and theoretical calculations of the Landau damping due to the ADTS. The findings point toward an influence of the Landau damping in combination with the low synchrotron frequency, which indicates that this effect could become relevant in the future low-emittance electron storage rings. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

The self-interaction of short electron bunches with their own radiation field can have a significant impact on the longitudinal beam dynamics in a storage ring. While higher bunch currents increase the power of the emitted CSR which can be provided to dedicated experiments, it simultaneously amplifies the strength of the self-interaction. Eventually, this leads to the formation of dynamically changing micro-structures within the bunch and thus fluctuating CSR emission, a phenomenon that is generally known as micro-bunching or micro-wave instability. The underlying longitudinal dynamics can be simulated by solving the VFP equation, where the CSR self-interaction can be added as a perturbation to the Hamiltonian. In this contribution, we focus on the perturbation of the synchrotron motion that is caused by introducing this additional wake field. Therefore, we adopt the perspective of a single particle and eventually comment on its implications for collective motion. We explicitly show how the shape of the parallel plates CSR wake potential breaks homogeneity in the longitudinal phase space and propose a quadrupole-like mode as potential seeding mechanism of the micro-bunching instability. Moreover, we consider synchrotron motion above the instability threshold and thereby motivate an approach to control of the occurring micro-bunching dynamics. Using dynamically adjusted RF amplitude modulations we can directly address the continuous CSR-induced perturbation at the timescale of its occurrence, which allows for substantial control over the longitudinal charge distribution. While the approach is not limited to this particular application, we demonstrate how this can significantly mitigate the micro-bunching dynamics directly above the instability threshold. The gained insights are supported and verified using the VFP solver Inovesa and put into context with measurements at KARA.

Coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) is generated when the electron bunch length is in the order of the magnitude of the wavelength of the emitted radiation. The self-interaction of short electron bunches with their own electromagnetic fields changes the longitudinal beam dynamics significantly. Above a certain current threshold the micro-bunching instability develops, characterized by the appearance of distinguishable substructures in the longitudinal phase space of the bunch. To stabilize the CSR emission, a real-time feedback control loop based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) is proposed. Informed by the available THz diagnostics, the feedback is designed to act on the RF system of the storage ring in order to mitigate the micro-bunching dynamics. To satisfy low-latency requirements given by the longitudinal beam dynamics, the RL controller has been implemented on hardware (FPGA). In this paper, a real-time feedback loop architecture and its performance is presented and compared with a software implementation using Keras-RL on CPU/GPU. The results obtained with the CSR simulation Inovesa demonstrate that the functionality of both platforms is equivalent. The training performance of the hardware implementation is similar to software solution, while it outperforms the Keras-RL implementation by an order of magnitude. The presented RL hardware controller is considered as an essential platform for the development of intelligent CSR control systems.

In recent and future synchrotron radiation facilities, relativistic electron bunches with increasingly high charge density are needed for producing brilliant light at various wavelengths, from X-rays to terahertz. In such conditions, interaction of electron bunches with their own emitted electromagnetic fields leads to instabilities and spontaneous formation of complex spatial structures. Understanding these instabilities is therefore key in most electron accelerators. However, investigations suffer from the lack of non-destructive recording tools for electron bunch shapes. In storage rings, most studies thus focus on the resulting emitted radiation. Here, we present measurements of the electric field in the immediate vicinity of the electron bunch in a storage ring, over many turns. For recording the ultrafast electric field, we designed a photonic time-stretch analog-to-digital converter with terasamples/second acquisition rate. We could thus observe the predicted link between spontaneous pattern formation and giant bursts of coherent synchrotron radiation in a storage ring.

At KARA, the Karlsruhe Research Accelerator of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology synchrotron, the so-called short-bunch operation mode allows the reduction of the bunch length down to a few picoseconds. The microbunching instability resulting from the high degree of longitudinal compression leads to fluctuations in the emitted terahertz radiation, referred to as bursting. For extremely compressed bunches at KARA, bursting occurs not only in one but in two different bunch-current ranges that are separated by a stable region. This work presents measurements of the thresholds and bursting frequencies in both regimes. Good agreement is found between the data and numerical solutions of the Vlasov-Fokker-Planck equation.