An application for the automatic phasing of quarter wave cavities at HIE ISOLDE

The HIE upgrade at ISOLDE will use 32 independently phased superconducting quarter wave cavities, and aims to study a large range of different radioactive species. The broad experimental programme means that the same beam species and energy are rarely studied twice, and hence the linac must be rephased for each experiment. In order to speed up this process, an automatic phasing routine has been developed which takes as input the properties of the beam and the linear accelerator as well as the desired final energy, and calculates the necessary phases and voltages on each cavity. The phasing routine has also been used to better understand the longitudinal beam dynamics and how errors and uncertainties will affect phasing of the cavities, leading to a set of tolerances for each of the different linac parameters.