Measuring and optimizing the momentum aperture in a particle accelerator

Particle motion in storage rings is confined by various aperture limits, the size of which restricts the performance of the ring in terms of injection efficiency, lifetime, etc. Intrabeam scattering makes particles sweep a large portion of the phase space, where their motion may eventually be resonantly or chaotically excited to large amplitudes leading to collision with the vacuum chamber. We report here the studies performed at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) on the on- and off-momentum particle motion that provides a good understanding of these limitations. Using off-momentum simulations and experiments together with frequency map analysis, we could precisely correlate beam loss areas with resonance locations. The very good agreement between simulations and experiments allowed us to provide guidance for avoiding these dangerous areas. This analysis results in predictive improvements of the momentum aperture, which actually led to a lifetime increase of 25% at the ALS for very high bunch charge.