Speaker
Description
In the early stages of heavy-ion accelerator chains, sub-nanosecond bunches with velocities between roughly 1% and 20% of the speed of light are produced, demanding longitudinal diagnostics with GHz-scale temporal resolution. Fast Faraday Cups (FFCs) are used to measure the longitudinal charge distribution of such bunches. Their design must simultaneously mitigate pre-field effects and suppress secondary electron emission (SEE) while enabling bunch-by-bunch measurements.
In this talk, we present a tapered, radially coupled FFC, partially manufactured using additive manufacturing (AM), and compare it with an identical version manufactured using conventional techniques. This allows the influence of the manufacturing method on geometric precision and RF properties to be assessed. Finally, we present measurements with ion bunches at the GSI UNILAC in the X2 cave, demonstrating improved SEE suppression and signal-to-noise ratio of the AM-based design while maintaining sufficient temporal resolution for sub-nanosecond bunch diagnostics.