AGS slow extracted beam improvement

The Brookhaven AGS is a strong focusing accelerator which is used to accelerate protons and various heavy ion species to an equivalent proton energy of 29 Gev. Since the late 1960´s it has been serving high energy physics (HEP-proton beam) users of both slow and fast extracted beams. The AGS fixed target program presently uses primary proton and heavy ion beams (HIP) in slowly extracted fashion over spill lengths of 1.5 to 4.0 seconds. Extraction is accomplished by flattopping the main and extraction magnets and exciting a third integer resonance in the AGS. Over the long spill times, control of the subharmonic amplitude components up to a frequency of 1 kilohertz is very crucial. One of the most critical contributions to spill modulation is due to the AGS MMPS. An active filter was developed to reduce these frequencies and its operation is described in a previous paper. However there are still frequency components in the 60-720 Hz sub-harmonic ripple range, modulating the spill structure due to extraction power supplies and any remaining structures on the AGS MMPS. A recent scheme is being developed to use the existing tune-trim control horizontal quadrupole magnets and power supply to further reduce these troublesome noise sources. Feedback from an external beam sensor and overcoming the limitations of the quadrupole system by lead/lag compensation techniques will be described