RF cogging in the FNAL Booster accelerator

The Fermilab Booster operates at a radio frequency (RF) harmonic number of 84 with beam in all buckets. One or two bunches of beam are systematically lost in the 8 GeV extraction process as beam is swept across a magnetic septum during the extraction kicker rise time. The prompt radiation and component activation resulting from this localized high energy beam loss become serious concerns as Booster beam throughput must be increased more than tenfold to meet the requirements of RUN II, NUMI, and MiniBooNE experiments. Synchronizing a gap in the beam to the firing of the extraction kickers, a relatively easy and standard practice in many machines, can eliminate the problem. This seemingly simple operation is greatly complicated in the Booster by the need to synchronize extraction to beam already circulating in the Main Injector. Coupled with the inflexibility of the Booster resonant magnetic cycle, cycle to cycle variations, and constraints inherent in the accelerator physics, that requirement forces active control of the gap's azimuthal position throughout the acceleration process as the revolution frequency sweeps rapidly. Until recently, the complexities of actually implementing and demonstrating this process in the Booster had not been worked out. This paper describes a successful demonstration of gap cogging in the Booster.