FPGA-Based Heavy-Ion Beam Trajectory Estimation and Control for Superconducting RF Cavity Resonator Applications

The manipulation of heavy ion beams by applying fluctuating external electric and magnetic fields is discussed here. The critical beam parameters that are identified with beam trajectory are identified and their properties are discussed. Most of the beam measurements are based on the electromagnetic fields induced by the beam. The analog signals obtained from the sensors are amplified and shaped before they were converted into numerical values, which are then further treated in order to extract meaningful machine parameter measurements. The primary goal is to calculate the ion beam position and degree of spatial coherence. Beam position monitors (BPM) are used for this purpose. The pickup (PU) points were defined to collect the horizontal and vertical difference signals, that in turn were used to calculate the position and trajectory. A system of quadrupoles, modified quadrupoles and octupoles was replacably used for confining and focusing the beam. The BPM readings were modeled based on the readings from simulated ion motion in MATLAB. These results were further processed with noise and digitized and fed into an FPGA implementation of the Kalman filter for estimation of the ion trajectory.