Active suppression of microphonics detuning in high QL cavities

Abstract

Operation of superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities with high loaded quality factors is becoming increasingly preferred for applications which involve low beam loading including energy recovery linacs (ERL). Vibration induced microphonics detuning poses a major operational bottleneck in these low bandwidth systems, adversely affecting field stability. Besides passive measures of mitigating the vibration sources, modern SRF cavities are also attached to fast tuners incorporating piezoelectric actuators. We demonstrate the narrow band active noise control algorithm for realizing active resonance control and propose a modification based on the least mean square approach to adaptively tune the control parameters and study its stability and performance. We discuss our experience of using passive mitigation techniques while commissioning the main linac cryomodule of the Cornell-BNL ERL test accelerator and report a net reduction in peak detuning by more than a factor of 2 in its unstiffened cavities. Finally, we demonstrate stable performance of our resonance control system with consistent reduction of peak microphonics detuning by almost a factor of 2 on multiple cavities.