Emittance Characterisation of High Brightness Beams in the CERN PS

Measurements in the CERN Proton Synchrotron showed that achieving the required accuracy for the emittance characterisation of high brightness beams is challenging. Some of the present limits can be related to systematic errors in the wire scanner calibration or, for the horizontal emittance determination, in the assumptions adopted while deconvoluting the contribution of the longitudinal plane from the measured transverse profile. We present in this paper the results of a beam-based test of the wire scanner calibration and of a general numerical deconvolution algorithm to compute the betatronic profile starting from the measured ones. In addition to the bunch train average emittance, a bunch-by-bunch transverse emittance measurement would increase the potential to understand, optimise and monitor the beam performance. In 2015 the first PS bunch-by-bunch measurement chain was setup. The results are reported and discussed.