Landau Damping of Beam Instabilities by Electron Lenses.

Modern and future particle accelerators employ increasingly higher intensity and brighter beams of charged particles and become operationally limited by coherent beam instabilities. Usual methods to control the instabilities, such as octupole magnets, beam feedback dampers, and use of chromatic effects, become less effective and insufficient. We show that, in contrast, Lorentz forces of a low-energy, magnetically stabilized electron beam, or "electron lens," easily introduce transverse nonlinear focusing sufficient for Landau damping of transverse beam instabilities in accelerators. It is also important to note that, unlike other nonlinear elements, the electron lens provides the frequency spread mainly at the beam core, thus allowing much higher frequency spread without lifetime degradation. For the parameters of the Future Circular Collider, a single conventional electron lens a few meters long would provide stabilization superior to tens of thousands of superconducting octupole magnets.

Experimental demonstration of colliding-beam-lifetime improvement by electron lenses.

We report the successful application of space-charge forces of a low-energy electron beam for improvement of particle lifetime determined by beam-beam interaction at a high-energy collider. In our experiments, an electron lens, a novel instrument developed for the beam-beam compensation, was set on a 980-GeV proton bunch at the Fermilab Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. The proton-bunch losses due to its interaction with the antiproton beam were reduced by a factor of 2 when the electron lens was operating. We describe the principle of electron lens operation and present experimental results.