Space Charge Studies on LEIR

The performance of the CERN Low Energy Ion Ring with electron cooled ion beams is presently limited by losses occurring once the beam has been captured in the RF buckets. An intense machine study program was started by the end of 2015 to mitigate the losses and improve the performance of the accelerator. The measurements pointed to the interplay of direct space charge forces and excited betatron resonances as the most plausible driving mechanism of these losses. In this paper, we present the systematic space-charge measurements performed in 2017 and compare them to space-charge tracking simulations based on an adaptive frozen potential.