Towards a Transverse Feedback System and Damper for the SPS in the LHC Era

The SPS will serve as injector for the LHC, accelerating up to 4 x 10^13 protons per cycle from 26 GeV/c to 450 GeV/c. The transverse feedback system (damper) is essential for keeping the transverse emittance blowup within the limits fixed for the LHC injector chain. The fast filamentation requires rapid damping of any injection errors. Injection errors are the combined result of steering errors and ripples on the magnet power supplies in the transfer line as well as from the PS extraction kicker and the SPS injection kicker. Besides damping injection oscillations the damper will also provide transverse feedback to stabilise the beam against the resistive wall coupled bunch instability. The required bandwidth, kick strength and power bandwidth (rise time) were discussed during the 1996 Montreux "Workshop on High Brightness Beams for Large Hadron Colliders" in the working group on "Active Emittance Control". In the present report the requirements for the damper are summarised and the development of a system to meet these specifications, based on the existing hardware, is described.