Transverse Digital Damper System for the Fermilab Anti-Proton Recycler

A transverse damping system is used in the Recycler at Fermilab to damp beam instabilities which arise from large beam intensities with electron cooling. Initial tests of electron cooling demonstrated beam loss due to transverse beam motion when the beam was cooled past the beam density threshold. The transverse damper system consists of two horizontal and two vertical pickups whose signals are amplified and passed into an analog hybrid to generate a difference signal from each pickup. The difference signals are input to a custom digital damper board which digitizes the analog signals at 212mhz, performs digital processing of the signals inside a large Altera Stratix II FPGA, then provides analog output at 212mhz via digital to analog converters. The digital damper output is sent to amplifiers which drive one horizontal and one vertical kicker. An initial prototype digital damper board has been successfully used in the Recycler for over six months. Currently, work is underway to replace the prototype board with an upgraded VME version.