Ion cooling and accumulation

For the preparation of dense bunches of ions for the LHC it has been proposed to accumulate in a small storage ring the beam from a linac with an ECR source. The scheme involves combined transverse and longitudinal multiturn injection and strong electron cooling to free phase space for the next injection. Successful experiments to determine the optimum parameters of a low-energy ion accumulator were performed at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) with Pb-ions of charge state 52+ to 55+ at an energy of 4.2 MeV/u. The reported measurements include: lifetime for different charge states as a function of the electron cooler current, cooling rates with different optical settings, efficiencies of the combined multiturn injection and results of accumulation. The transformation of LEAR into an accumulator ring for a wide range of ion species will be based on these results.