Electron Cooling Experiment for Proton Beams with Intense Space-charge in IOTA

TL;DR

This paper discusses a new experiment at Fermilab's IOTA to study electron cooling of high-intensity 2.5 MeV proton beams, focusing on the effects of intense space-charge forces on cooling efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental setup for magnetized electron cooling of proton beams with high space-charge effects at IOTA.

Findings

Design of the experimental hardware and setup

Simulation results guiding the experiment

Planned experiments to investigate cooling limits

Abstract

Electron cooling as a method of creating intense ion beams has a practical upper limit when it comes to the peak phase space density of ion beams which can be achieved in practice. We describe a new experiment to study electron cooling of 2.5 MeV protons at the intensity limit using the Integrable Optics Test Accelerator (IOTA), which is a storage ring dedicated to beam physics research at Fermilab. This system will enable the study of magnetized electron cooling of a proton beam with transverse incoherent tune shifts approaching -0.5 due to the presence of intense space-charge forces. We present an overview of the hardware design, simulations and specific experiments planned for this project.