Adiabaticity and Reversibility Studies for Beam Splitting using Stable Resonances

At the CERN Proton Synchrotron, a series of beam experiments proved beam splitting by crossing the one-fourth resonance. Depending on the speed at which the horizontal resonance is crossed, the splitting process is more or less adiabatic, and a different fraction of the initial beam is trapped in the islands. Experiments prove that when the trapping process is reversed and the islands merged together, the final distribution features thick tails. The beam population in such tails is correlated to the speed of the resonance crossing and to the fraction of the beam trapped in the stable islands. Experiments and possible theoretical explanations are discussed.