Transverse beam splitting made operational: Recent progress of the multi-turn extraction at the CERN proton synchrotron

Following a successful commissioning period, the Multi-Turn Extraction (MTE) at the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) has been applied for the fixed-target physics programme at the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) since September 2015. This exceptional extraction technique was proposed to replace the long-serving Continuous Transfer (CT) extraction, which has the drawback of inducing high activation in the ring. MTE exploits the principles of non-linear beam dynamics to perform loss-free beam splitting in the horizontal phase space. Over multiple turns, the resulting beamlets are then transferred to the downstream accelerator. The operational deployment of MTE was rendered possible by the full understanding and mitigation of different hardware limitations and by redesigning the extraction trajectories and non-linear optics, which was required due to the installation of a dummy septum to reduce the activation of the magnetic extraction septum. The results of the related experimental and simulation studies, a summary of the 2015 performance analysis, as well as more recent performance improvements are presented in this paper.