ALBA storage ring reaches 100 mA

The commissioning of the ALBA Storage Ring started on Tuesday 8th of March 2011 at 14:00h. Within one day the beam made few turns around the machine, and on the 13th of March, after switching on the RF, the beam was stored.

Three days later, the 16th of March, the beam was accumulated with parameters close to the nominal ones. This was confirmed by finding no difficulty coming from the 3 small gap (8mm) vacuum chambers already installed in the Storage Ring. After having tested all the machine protection system, on Friday 01.04.11 100 mA were stored on the storage ring.

This fast start-up has shown that the three accelerators (Linac, Booster and Storage Ring) are behaving as designed; and that all the different and numerous sub-systems have been properly installed and are working according to specs.

The coming weeks will be dedicated to reach stable and reproducible settings, to measure the parameters of the accelerators in order to obtain the nominal settings, to correct the orbit, to increase the current and to clean the vacuum chamber with synchrotron radiation.

In May, it is expected to test the first 3 Insertion Devices, two APPLE-II undulators and a normal conducting wiggler, which are already installed on the machine.

In the following there are some pictures and plots from the 16th of March 2011, a historical day for the ALBA project.