Scaled electron studies at the University of Maryland

Recent experiments performed on the University of Maryland Electron Ring (UMER) have demonstrated the advantages of using a scaled electron machine to economically investigate the nonlinear physics of a space-charge-dominated beam. This physics is important to larger and much more expensive machines, including accelerator systems for the study High Energy Density Physics and Heavy Ion Fusion. UMER has been successfully used for studying source and injector physics, developing diagnostics, and benchmarking simulations, as well as for investigating the special sensitivity of a space-charge-dominated machine to small deviations from the nominal design parameters. A description will also be presented of studies that utilize the downstream consequences of a controlled initial perturbation of the beam distribution for the study of both longitudinal and transverse beam physics. Current work to optimize ring operation will also be discussed. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier B.V.