ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA
The SNS linac operation at its design average power currently is not limited by uncontrolled beam loss. However, further reduction of the beam loss remains an important aspect of the SNS linac tune up and operation. Even small “acceptable” beam loss leads to long term degradation of the accelerator equipment. The current state of model-based tuning at SNS leaves an unacceptably large residual beam loss level and has to be followed by an empirical, sometimes random, adjustment of many parameters to reduce the loss. This talk will discuss a set of coordinated efforts to develop tools for large dynamic range measurements, simulation and collimation in order to facilitate low loss linac tuning.
