The Conversion of CESR to Operate as the Test Accelerator, CesrTA, Part 1: Overview

TL;DR

This paper describes the transformation of Cornell's CESR storage ring into CesrTA, a versatile test accelerator designed for advanced research in accelerator physics, instrumentation, and beam dynamics, relevant to future collider and light source projects.

Contribution

It presents the design, motivation, and implementation of converting CESR into CesrTA, enabling studies of low emittance tuning, electron cloud effects, and other accelerator physics issues.

Findings

CESR was successfully converted into CesrTA with enhanced capabilities.

CesrTA can study a wide range of accelerator physics phenomena.

The reconfiguration supports research relevant to future collider designs.

Abstract

Cornell's electron/positron storage ring (CESR) was modified over a series of accelerator shutdowns beginning in May 2008, which substantially improves its capability for research and development for particle accelerators. CESR's energy span from 1.8 to 5.6 GeV with both electrons and positrons makes it ideal for the study of a wide spectrum of accelerator physics issues and instrumentation related to present light sources and future lepton damping rings. Additionally a number of these are also relevant for the beam physics of proton accelerators. This paper outlines the motivation, design and conversion of CESR to a test accelerator, CesrTA, enhanced to study such subjects as low emittance tuning methods, electron cloud (EC) effects, intra-beam scattering, fast ion instabilities as well as general improvements to beam instrumentation. While the initial studies of CesrTA focussed on questions related to the International Linear Collider (ILC) damping ring design, CesrTA is a very flexible storage ring, capable of studying a wide range of accelerator physics and instrumentation questions. This paper contains the outline and the basis for a set of papers documenting the reconfiguration of the storage ring and the associated instrumentation required for the studies described above. Further details may be found in these papers.