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

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time data acquisition system for measuring longitudinal beam properties in Fermilab's booster ring, utilizing commercial hardware and software to capture critical beam parameters during rapid acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, real-time data acquisition system specifically designed for high-speed beam property measurements in a synchrotron.

Findings

System successfully captures real-time beam data

Optimized hardware and software for high-speed processing

Enables detailed analysis of beam dynamics during acceleration

Abstract

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.