Undergraduate Research at Jefferson Lab

Designing a High-Speed Wire Scanning System for Harp

Student: Bryce Bailey

School: University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Mentored By: Jianxun Yan

The Low Energy Recirculator Facility (LERF) at Jefferson Lab constructs and tests harps to measure and provide live data from the accelerator beam, namely allowing for the beam position and three-dimensional profile to be gathered and analyzed. The focus of this project was to design and construct an interconnected system for a new harp at LERF that would consist of a circuit board to be connected and able to communicate together with the stepper motor, controllers, encoders and the Linux system at Jefferson Lab via an Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) program allowing for easy control of and live data-gathering for the harp and beam profile and position. In order to obtain data on the accuracy of the beam position detection aspects of the harp wire-scanning system, a laser beam connected to a photodiode and a high-resolution camera was used to simulate the electron beam in order to gather real-time beam position data. It is shown through this research that using an integrated system of components connected to a harp, is an effective method of data gathering from a particle beam. The data gathered from this experiment can help researchers at the LERF and Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) be able to implement a harp along with the interconnected system of components in order to swiftly and accurately gather useful beam data when running experiments or diagnostics.