Use of RF quadrupole structures to enhance stability in accelerator rings

The beams required for the high luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) at CERN call for efficient mechanisms to suppress transverse collective instabilities. In addition to octupole magnets installed for the purpose of Landau damping, we propose to use radio frequency (rf) quadrupole structures to considerably enhance the aforementioned stabilising effect. By means of the PyHEADTAIL macroparticle tracking code, the stabilising mechanism introduced by an rf quadrupole is studied and discussed. As a specific example, the performance of an rf quadrupole system in presence of magnetic octupoles is demonstrated for HL-LHC. Furthermore, potential performance limitations such as the excitation of synchro-betatron resonances are pointed out. Finally, efforts towards possible measurements with the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) are discussed aiming at studying the underlying stabilising mechanisms experimentally.