Proof-of-Principle Experiment for FEL-based Coherent Electron Cooling

Coherent electron cooling (CEC) has a potential to significantly boost luminosity of high-energy, high-intensity hadron-hadron and electron-hadron colliders*. In a CEC system, a hadron beam interacts with a cooling electron beam. A perturbation of the electron density caused by ions is amplified and fed back to the ions to reduce the energy spread and the emittance of the ion beam. To demonstrate the feasibility of CEC we propose a proof-of-principle experiment at RHIC using one of JLab's SRF cryo-modules. In this paper, we describe the experimental setup for CeC installed into one of RHIC's interaction regions. We present results of analytical estimates and results of initial simulations of cooling a gold-ion beam at 40 GeV/u energy via CeC.