A data acquisition system for longitudinal beam properties in a rapid cycling synchrotron

A longitudinal beam properties, data acquisition system has been commissioned to operate in the Fermilab booster ring. This system captures real time information including beam synchronous phase, bunch length, and coupled bunch instability amplitudes as the beam is accelerated from 400 MeV to 8 GeV in 33 ms. The system uses an off-the-shelf Tektronix oscilloscope running Labview software and a synchronous pulse generator. This paper describes the hardware configuration and the software configuration used to optimize the data processing rate. The Fermilab Booster is currently pushed to its intensity limit due to the high demand from different experiments for protons. This will continue into the era of the intensity frontier. While intensity is the most critical parameter, emittance must be controlled as well. Longitudinal emittance is an important parameter for optimizing the slip stacking process in the Main Injector. Longitudinal instabilities can spoil the emittance, so it is important to monitor bunch lengths and bunch phase oscillations in the Booster. The Booster presents a special challenge when it comes to measuring beam properties. The acceleration ramp is short (33ms), and the RF frequency varies from 38-52.8 MHz. Standard instrumentation like spectrum analyzers and network analyzers cannot effectively measure beam properties, because they cannot track the changing frequencies. Early instrumentation involved a series of tracking oscillators, mixers, and diode detectors that would require vigilant calibration. There was a demand for a more robust means of gathering beam parameters.