Adaptive feedforward cancellation of sinusoidal disturbances in superconducting RF cavities

A control method, known as adaptive feedforward cancellation (AFC), is applied to damp sinusoidal disturbances due to microphonics in superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities. AFC provides a method for damping internal and external sinusoidal disturbances with known frequencies. It is preferred over other schemes because it uses rudimentary information about the frequency response at the disturbance frequencies, without the necessity for an analytic model (transfer function) of the system. It estimates the magnitude and phase of the sinusoidal disturbance inputs and generates a control signal to cancel their effect. AFC, along with a frequency estimation process, is shown to be very successful in the cancellation of sinusoidal signals from different sources. The results of this research may significantly reduce the power requirements and increase the stability for lightly loaded continuous-wave SRF systems.