Control, timing, and data acquisition for the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA)

The AWA is a new facility primarily designed for wakefield acceleration experiments at the 100 MV/m scale, which incorporates a high current linac and rf photocathode electron source, a low emittance rf electron gun for witness beam generation, and associated beamlines and diagnostics. The control system is based on VME and CAMAC electronics interfaced to a high performance workstation and provides some distributed processing capability. In addition to the control of linac rf, laser optics, and beamlines, the system is also used for aquisition of video data both from luminescent beam position monitors and from streak camera pulse length diagnostics. Online image feature extraction will permit wakefields to be computed during the course of data taking. The linac timing electronics and its interface to the control system is described