The Fermilab Booster - built more than 40 years ago - operates well above the design proton beam intensity of 4 · 1012 ppp. Still, the Fermilab neutrino experiments call for even higher intensity exceeding 5.5 · 1012 ppp. A multitude of intensity related effects must be overcome in order to meet this goal including suppression of coherent dipole instabilities of transverse oscillations which manifest themselves as a sudden drop in the beam current. In this report we present the results of observation of these instabilities at different tune, coupling and chromaticity settings and discuss possible cures.

A new transverse instability is observed that may limit the proton intensity in the Fermilab Recycler. The instability is fast, leading to a beam-abort loss within two hundred turns. The instability primarily affects the first high-intensity batch from the Fermilab Booster in each Recycler cycle. This paper analyzes the dynamical features of the destabilized beam. The instability excites a horizontal betatron oscillation which couples into the vertical motion and also causes transverse emittance growth. This paper describes the feasibility of electron cloud as the mechanism for this instability and presents the first measurements of the electron cloud in the Fermilab Recycler. Direct measurements of the electron cloud are made using a retarding field analyzer (RFA) newly installed in the Fermilab Recycler. Indirect measurements of the electron cloud are made by propagating a microwave carrier signal through the beampipe and analyzing the phase modulation of the signal. The maximum betatron amplitude growth and the maximum electron cloud signal occur during minimums of the bunch length oscillation.

Transverse instabilities of the antiproton beam have been observed in the Recycler ring soon after its commissioning. After installation of transverse dampers, the threshold for the instability limit increased significantly but the instability is still found to limit the brightness of the antiprotons extracted from the Recycler for Tevatron shots. In this paper, we describe observations of the instabilities during the extraction process as well as during dedicated studies. The measured instability threshold phase density agrees with the prediction of the rigid beam model within a factor of 2. Also, we conclude that the instability threshold can be significantly lowered for a bunch contained in a narrow and shallow potential well due to effective exclusion of the longitudinal tails from Landau damping.

Systems to damp radial and vertical instabilities of individual rf bunches in the Fermilab Booster are being implemented. The positions of individual bunches are derived from stripline pickups. The position information is transmitted over a variable delay, amplified, and applied to deflectors after one almost complete revolution, 6.25 horizontal and 6.75 vertical betatron wavelengths downstream of the pickup. Motivation, system concepts, design considerations, and initial operating experience are described.