A VXI/Lab VIEW-based beamline tuner

A general purpose beamline tuner is being developed to reduce betatron oscillations resulting from missteering during beam transfer. The tuner is based on VXI instruments controlled by a Lab VIEW program running on a Macintosh computer. VXI digitizers take turn-by turn data from beam position monitors followed by an analysis of the data in the time- and frequency-domains. The results, the phase and amplitude of the betatron oscillations, are communicated from Lab VIEW to the control system over a tokenring network. An application program at a control console calculates the required changes in the correction elements for the phase and amplitude to reduce the oscillations. The beamline tuner is self-contained and easy to adapt to other beamlines. Early results indicate that the tuner outperforms the current system