Relativistic-beam Pickup Test Facility

The electrical response of pickups and cavities to charged particle beams has been an area of considerable activity and concern for accelerator systems. With the advent of stochastic beam cooling, the position and frequency response of beam pickups has become a crucial parameter in determining the performance of these systems. The most frequently used method for measuring and calibrating beam pickups has been the use of current carrying wires to simulate relativistic beams. This method has sometimes led to incorrect predictions of the pickup response to particle beams. The reasons for the differences are not always obvious but could arise from: (1) wires are incapable of exciting or permitting many of the modes that beams excite or (2) the interaction of the wire with large arrays of pickups produce results which are not easily predicted. At Argonne these deficiencies are resolved by calibrating pickups with a relativistic electron beam. This facility is being used extensively by several groups to measure beam pickup devices and is the primary calibration facility for pickups to be used in the FNAL TEV-I Antiproton Source