Ion effects in the SLC electron damping ring

We report on the ion-related beam behavior in the electron damping ring during unusually poor vacuum conditions in the weeks that followed a catastrophic kicker chamber failure that contaminated the ring vacuum system. The vacuum gradually improved over several months of beam operation, during which time the vertical emittance remained blown up by a factor of 2. The emittance blowup was accompanied by a transverse instability that produced jitter in the extracted beam size. Both the characteristic spectrum of self-excited betatron sidebands and the emittance blowup exhibited a threshold behavior with beam current and vacuum pressure. This behavior depended strongly on the betatron tune and it was found that the ion effects could be minimized by operating just below the 1/2 integer resonance