Mitigation of ground motion effects in linear accelerators via feed-forward control

Ground motion is a severe problem for many particle accelerators, since it excites beam oscillations, which decrease the beam quality and create beam-beam offset (at colliders). Orbit feedback systems can only compensate ground motion effects at frequencies significantly smaller than the beam repetition rate. In linear colliders, where the repetition rate is low, additional counter measures have to be put in place. For this reason, a ground motion mitigation method based on feed-forward control is presented in this paper. It has several advantages compared to other techniques (stabilization systems and intratrain feedback systems) such as cost reduction and potential performance improvement. An analytical model is presented that allows the derivation of hardware specification and performance estimates for a specific accelerator and ground motion model. At the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF2), ground motion sensors have been installed to verify the feasibility of important parts of the mitigation strategy. In experimental studies, it has been shown that beam excitations due to ground motion can be predicted from ground motion measurements on a pulse-to-pulse basis. Correlations of up to 80% between the estimated and measured orbit jitter have been observed. Additionally, an orbit jitter source was identified and has been removed, which halved the orbit jitter power at ATF2 and shows that the feed-forward scheme is also very useful for the detection of installation issues. We believe that the presented mitigation method has the potential to reduce costs and improve the performance of linear colliders and potentially other linear accelerators.