Novel Beam Excitation System Based on Software-Defined Radio

A signal generator for transverse excitation of stored particle beams is developed and commissioned at GSI SIS18. Thereby a novel approach using a software-defined radio system and the open-source GNU Radio ecosystem is taken. This allows for a low cost yet highly flexible setup for creating customizable and tuneable excitation spectra. Due to its open-source nature, it has the potential for long term maintainability and integrability into the accelerator environment. Furthermore, this opens up the possibility to easily share algorithms for the generation of waveforms across accelerator facilities. As a first application, the device is used to control the coherence and amplitude of transverse oscillations by excitation in the vicinity of betatron sidebands. It enables measurement of beam parameters like tune and chromaticity. On a longer term, it will be used for more complex tasks such as beam shaping, extraction and automated parameter scans towards these complex processes