Coupling correction and beam dynamics at ultralow vertical emittance in the ALS

For synchrotron light sources and for damping rings of linear colliders it is important to be able to minimize the vertical emittance and to correct the spurious vertical dispersion. This allows one to maximize the brightness and/or the luminosity. A commonly used tool to measure the skew error distribution is the analysis of orbit response matrices using codes like LOCO. Using the new Matlab version of LOCO and 18 newly installed power supplies for individual skew quadrupoles at the ALS the emittance ratio could be reduced below 0.1% at 1.9 GeV yielding a vertical emittance of about 5 pm. At those very low emittances, additional effects like intra beam scattering become more important, potentially limiting the minimum emittance for machine like the damping rings of linear colliders