A detector of bunch time structure for cw heavy-ion beams

The manuscript describes the design, commissioning and performance of a new device for the measurement of bunch time structure of heavy-ion beams. The Bunch Length Detector (BLD) has been developed, constructed and installed at the Argonne Tandem Linear Accelerating System, a superconducting linac. The BLD is a wire scanning detector based on the analysis of secondary electrons produced by the primary beam hitting a target wire. The device provides measuring of bunch phase spectrum for ion beams in a wide range of energies, intensities and species in cw mode with up to 20 ps resolution.