Beam position diagnostics with higher order modes in third harmonic superconducting accelerating cavities

Higher order modes (HOM) are electromagnetic resonant fields. They can be excited by an electron beam entering an accelerating cavity, and constitute a component of the wakefield. This wakefield has the potential to dilute the beam quality and, in the worst case, result in a beam-break-up instability. It is therefore important to ensure that these fields are well suppressed by extracting energy through special couplers. In addition, the effect of the transverse wakefield can be reduced by aligning the beam on the cavity axis. This is due to their strength depending on the transverse offset of the excitation beam. For suitably small offsets the dominant components of the transverse wakefield are dipole modes, with a linear dependence on the transverse offset of the excitation bunch. This fact enables the transverse beam position inside the cavity to be determined by measuring the dipole modes extracted from the couplers, similar to a cavity beam position monitor (BPM), but requires no additional vacuum instrumentation. At the FLASH facility in DESY, 1.3 GHz (known as TESLA) and 3.9 GHz (third harmonic) cavities are installed. Wakefields in 3.9 GHz cavities are significantly larger than in the 1.3 GHz cavities. It is therefore important to mitigate the adverse effects of HOMs to the beam by aligning the beam on the electric axis of the cavities. This alignment requires an accurate beam position diagnostics inside the 3.9 GHz cavities. It is this aspect that is focused on in this thesis. Although the principle of beam diagnostics with HOM has been demonstrated on 1.3 GHz cavities, the realization in 3.9 GHz cavities is considerably more challenging. This is due to the dense HOM spectrum and the relatively strong coupling of most HOMs amongst the four cavities in the third harmonic cryo-module. A comprehensive series of simulations and HOM spectra measurements have been performed in order to study the modal band structure of the 3.9 GHz cavities. The dependencies of various dipole modes on the offset of the excitation beam were subsequently studied using a spectrum analyzer. Various data analysis methods were used: modal identification, direct linear regression, singular value decomposition and k-means clustering. These studies lead to three modal options promising for beam position diagnostics, upon which a set of test electronics has been built. The experiments with these electronics suggest a resolution of 50 micron accuracy in predicting local beam position in the cavity and a global resolution of 20 micron over the complete module. This constitutes the first demonstration of HOM-based beam diagnostics in a third harmonic 3.9 GHz superconducting cavity module. These studies have finalized the design of the online HOM-BPM for 3.9 GHz cavities at FLASH.