Influence of higher order modes on the beam stability in the high power superconducting proton linac

Higher order modes (HOMs) can severely limit the operation of superconducting cavities in a linear accelerator with high beam current, high duty factor, and complex pulse structure. The full HOM spectrum has to be analyzed in order to identify potentially dangerous modes already during the design phase and to define their damping requirements. For this purpose a dedicated beam simulation code simulation of higher order mode dynamics (SMD) focused on beam-HOM interaction was developed, taking into account important effects like the HOM frequency spread, beam input jitter, different chopping patterns, as well as klystron and alignment errors. Here, SMD is used to investigate the influence of HOMs in detail in the superconducting proton linac at CERN and their potential to drive beam instabilities in the longitudinal and transverse plane.