Beam Tests and Plans for the CERN PS Transverse Damper System

The CERN Proton Synchrotron (CPS) has been running without any transverse damping equipment since 1998, thanks to the stabilizing effect of the linear coupling applied between horizontal and vertical planes. \nLately, the demand for an active damper strongly emerged for two main reasons: to avoid restrictions as imposed on the betatron tune settings by the linear coupling and to cure instabilities appearing with high intensity beams, especially at the extraction energy. Late in 2012, two electronic prototype units, newly developed for the CPS one-turn-feedback, were programmed with a firmware designed to satisfy the transverse feedback (TFB) requirements in both planes. The main achievements were to automatically adapt the loop delay to the particles’ time-of-flight variation within a nanosecond precision and to compensate the changing betatron phase advance between pick-up and kicker during the entire accelerating cycle. With the power equipment limited to the modest bandwidth of 23 MHz and 2 x 800 W per plane, encouraging results were obtained such as fast damping of injection oscillations caused by injection errors, reduction of beam losses along the cycle and damping of instabilities at all CPS energies