Studies of RF Noise Induced Bunch Lengthening at the LHC

Radio Frequency noise induced bunch lengthening can strongly affect the Large Hadron Collider performance through luminosity reduction, particle loss, and other effects. Models and theoretical formalisms demonstrating the dependence of the LHC longitudinal bunch length on the RF station noise spectral content have been presented*,**. Initial measurements validated these studies and determined the performance limiting RF components. For the existing LHC LLRF implementation the bunch length increases with a rate of 1 mm/hr, which is higher than the intrabeam scattering diffusion and leads to a 27% bunch length increase over a 20 hour store. This work presents measurements from the LHC that better quantify the relationship between the RF noise and longitudinal emittance blowup. Noise was injected at specific frequency bands and with varying amplitudes at the LHC accelerating cavities. The experiments presented in this paper confirmed the predicted effects on the LHC bunch length due to both the noise around the synchrotron frequency resonance and the noise in other frequency bands aliased down to the synchrotron frequency by the periodic beam sampling of the accelerating voltage.