Studies of Transverse Instabilities in the CERN SPS

In the framework of the LHC Injectors Upgrade (LIU), beams with about twice the intensity compared to the present values will have to be accelerated by the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) and extracted towards the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Machine studies with intensity higher than the nominal LHC beam have shown that coherent instabilities in both transverse planes may develop at injection energy, potentially becoming a limitation for the future high intensity operation. In particular, a transverse mode coupling instability is encountered in the vertical plane, the threshold of which can be sufficiently increased by changing the machine optics. In addition, a headtail instability of individual bunches is observed in the horizontal plane in multi-bunch operation, which requires stabilization by high chromaticity. The PyHEADTAIL code has been used to check if the present SPS impedance model reproduces the experimental observations. The instability growth rates have been studied for different machine optics configurations and different chromaticity settings. Other stabilizing mechanisms like tune spread from octupoles or the transverse damper have also been investigated.