Present Performance of Electron Cooling at Cosy-J\"ulich

TL;DR

This paper discusses the current status of electron cooling at COSY-Jülich, highlighting its application, limitations due to instabilities, and potential improvements for better beam quality in ion accelerators.

Contribution

It provides an overview of the present performance and challenges of electron cooling at COSY-Jülich, including insights into instability issues and future prospects.

Findings

Electron cooling effectively prepares dense ion beams for experiments.

Beam intensity is limited by instabilities during cooling.

Coherent betatron oscillations cause significant beam losses.

Abstract

At COSY, electron cooling is used after stripping injection of H- or D- ions in order to prepare phase-space-dense ion beams before acceleration to a requested energy. The electron-cooled beam has been successfully applied for specific external experiments. The achievable beam intensity is limited by instabilities during the cooling process. Besides initial losses after injection, as long as the beam has still large emittances, the self-excitation of coherent betatron oscillations is the dominating beam loss mechanism. Perspectives for possible improvements are briefly addressed.