Uncontrolled Longitudinal Emittance Blow-Up during RF Manipulations in the CERN PS

The CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) determines the basic bunch spacing for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by means of rf manipulations. Several rf systems in a frequency range from 2.8 MHz to 200 MHz are available for beam acceleration and manipulations. Each of the six bunches injected from the PS Booster is split in several steps into 12 bunches spaced by 25 ns, yielding a batch of 72 bunches at transfer to the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS). In the framework of the LHC Injector Upgrade (LIU) project the bunch intensity must be doubled. However, with most of the planned upgrades already in place this intensity has not yet been achieved due to collective effects. One of them is uncontrolled longitudinal emittance blow-up during the bunch splittings. In this contribution, measurements of the blow-up during the splitting process are presented and compared with particle simulations using the present PS impedance model. Beam-based measurements of the impedances of the rf cavities have been performed. They revealed that to reproduce the instability an additional impedance source is required in the PS impedance model.