Novel Mechanical Design for RHIC Transverse Stochastic Cooling Kicker

Based on the beam emittance measurement from the pickup, the RHIC Stochastic Cooling kicker uses sixteen narrowband high Q cavities (from 5 to 8 GHz) to kick (or to cool) the bunched beam on each of the two transverse planes in the two rings. The cavities are integrated to two pairs of cavity plates and installed in two UHV chambers. The new kicker features scissor like driving mechanism, frictionless flexure joints, water cooled cavity plates, small frequency shift (less than 0.05%) during the operation and maintenance free. Novel mechanical designs, including cavity plate, vacuum, cooling, driving mechanism, and support structure design, are presented. Structural and thermal analyses, using ANSYS, were performed to confirm chamber structural stability and to calculate the cavity plate deformation due to thermal and mechanical load. Good agreement between the calculated cavity plate deflection and the expected plate deformation from the cavity frequency shift measurements has been achieved. Three assemblies utilizing this design (1 for the vertical and 2 for the horizontal plane) were completed for the FY2012 run. Successful performance has been reported.