PRECISION CONTROL OF INTENSE ELECTRON

Many applications of particle accelerators require beams with high intensity and low emittance in a stable fashion. An important research area involves the study of space-charge forces in beams, which are significant at low energy. Research reported in this dissertation was done on the University of Maryland Electron Ring (UMER), a particle accelerator designed for research on space-charge-dominated beams. High-precision control of space-charge-dominated beams is very challenging. However, standard beam control approaches do not work well on UMER. This is due to UMER’s unique structure, in which there are fewer beam position monitors than beam position correctors and a complex coupling between the horizontal and vertical kicker magnets. In this work, a novel beam control algorithm was devel-oped based on the closed-orbit response matrix, and this algorithm was applied to UMER. The algorithm markedly improves UMER’s multi-turn operation while re-ducing closed orbit distortion. Using the orbit response matrix, a diagnosis method was developed that expeditiously detected malfunctions in components such as bea