Accelerator Seminar: Automatic Re-Phasing of SCRF Cavities
Speaker: Spencer Kiy, TRIUMF ISAC Operations
Location: ISAC II Conf Rm
Time: 14:00
The superconducting linac at TRIUMF consists of 40 quarter wave cavities, with each cavity providing ~1 MV of acceleration to the beam. During the setup of a tune, these cavities are phased one at a time, sometimes resulting in quite long setup times. Currently, if a cavity fails after a tune has already been setup, and the cavity cannot be recovered, this leads to a SCRF expert being called in, or even worse to a re-tune of the linac. This can cause significant amounts of downtime. However, if the accelerating gradient of each cavity is known (along with TTF curves, intercavity distances, etc.), the linac can be automatically re-tuned by calculating the new arrival time of the beam at each subsequent cavity. Pairing a utility that can make this calculation with an easy to use graphic interface can potentially allow an operator to restore the tune to an experiment on their own (in the middle of the night for example), preventing large amounts of downtime. This utility also has the potential to allow automatic setups of the linac, eliminating the need for long setup times altogether and improving reliability.