Electrostatic injection kicker for the KEK digital accelerator

An electrostatic injection kicker (ES-Kicker) has been developed and installed in the KEK digital accelerator, which is a synchrotron aimed at accelerating all ion species. The ES-Kicker kicks an injected ion beam horizontally into the ring orbit and consists of two main electrodes for electric field generation and three intermediate electrodes to correct field homogeneity. In our single-turn injection scheme, the circulating beam and the injected beam both pass through the electrode aperture of the kicker, so the kicker field must be turned off before arrival of the first circulating beam. The ES-Kicker is therefore operated in a pulse mode. This means that the excitation circuit for the ES-Kicker must be carefully designed, since the falling edge of the electric field is strongly affected by parasitic capacitance of this circuit, and any remaining field may disturb the circulating beam. This paper describes performance of the ES-Kicker on the basis of simulations and measurement results