TOMOGRAPHIC MEASUREMENT OF THE PHASE-SPACE DISTRIBUTION OF A SPACE-CHARGE-DOMINATED BEAM

Abstract

Many applications of accelerators, such as free electron lasers, pulsed neutron sources, and heavy ion fusion, require a good quality beam with high intensity. In practice, the achievable intensity is often limited by the dynamics at the low-energy, space-charge dominated end of the machine. Because low-energy beams can have complex distribution functions, a good understanding of their detailed evolution is needed. To address this issue, we have developed a simple and accurate tomographic method to map the beam phase using quadrupole magnets, which includes the effects from space charge. We extend this technique to use also solenoidal magnets which are commonly used at low energies, especially in photoinjectors, thus making the diagnostic applicable to most machines. We simulate our technique using a particle in cell code (PIC), to ascertain accuracy of the reconstruction. Using this diagnostic we report a number of experiments to study and optimize injection, transport and acceleration of intense space charge dominated beams. We examine phase mixing, by studying the phase-space evolution of an intense beam with a transversely nonuniform initial density distribution. Experimental measurements, theoretical predictions and PIC simulations are in good agreement each other. Finally, we generate a parabolic beam pulse to model those beams from photoinjectors, and combine tomography with fast imaging techniques to investigate the time-sliced parameters of beam current, size, energy spread and transverse emittance. We found significant differences between the slice emittance profiles and slice orientation as the beam propagates downstream. The combined effect of longitudinal nonuniform profiles and fast imaging of the transverse phase space provided us with information about correlations between longitudinal and transverse dynamics that we report within this dissertation.