The Fermilab booster accelerator was originally conceived for acceleration of protons with an injection energy of 200 MeV to an extraction energy of ten GeV (to the 500 GeV main accelerator). Early booster operation has been limited to eight GeV. The booster beam will be more acceptable to the main accelerator if extraction is at ten GeV, thus the booster magnet system is now being modified for ten GeV acceleration. Regulation of the booster magnetic field for injection at 200 MeV was a task even when operating to eight GeV. An outline is given of the approach which was adopted and how it relates to the ten GeV attempt. Problems encountered in the design of any ac magnet system are discussed.

A Linac Afterburner is proposed to raise the energy of the beam injected into the Femrilab Booster from 400 MeV to about 600 MeV, thereby alleviating the longitudinal and transverse space-charge effects at low energy that currently limit its performance. The primary motivation is to increase the integrated luminosity of the Tevatron Collider in Run II, but other future programs would also recap substantial benefits. The estimated cost is $23M.

The aim of the experiments reported was to shed some light on the observed horizontal beam size growth in the Booster. A computational study of the effect of the impedance of the radio-frequency accelerating cavities has been carried out, and the results are compared with the experimental observations. Finally, possible cures for the instabilities are discussed.

With the implementation of the BPM system in the Fermilab Booster, complete survey data of the main magnets have been employed to determine magnet moving schemes to correct the high field orbit at 8 GeV kinetic energy and to understand the global pattern of the high field orbit in both planes. Considerable success has been achieved in the former task. We also obtained reasonable understanding in the later effort, given the multitude of factors that have to be dealt with. In this paper an account is given of the survey record, the orbit correction exercise, and the effort to reconstruct the high field orbit based on the survey records. 2 refs., 7 figs., 1 tab.

Over the past decade, Fermilab has focused efforts on the intensity frontier physics and is committed to increase the average beam power delivered to the neutrino and muon programs substantially. Many upgrades to the existing injector accelerators, namely, the current 400 MeV LINAC and the Booster, are in progress under the Proton Improvement Plan (PIP). Proton Improvement Plan-II (PIP-II) proposes to replace the existing 400 MeV LINAC by a new 800 MeV LINAC, as an injector to the Booster which will increase Booster output power by nearly a factor of two from the PIP design value by the end of its completion. In any case, the Fermilab Booster is going to play a very significant role for nearly next two decades. In this context, I have developed and investigated a new beam injection scheme called "early injection scheme" (EIS) for the Booster with the goal to significantly increase the beam intensity output from the Booster thereby increasing the beam power to the HEP experiments even before PIP-II era. The scheme, if implemented, will also help improve the slip-stacking efficiency in the MI/RR. Here I present results from recent simulations, beam studies, current status and future plans for the new scheme.