Measuring and Understanding the Momentum Aperture in a Storage Ring

The momentum aperture of a storage ring is a very important parameter that strongly influences the performance, especially the beam lifetime. For the special case of synchrotron light sources with small emittance like the Advanced Light Source (ALS), the momentum aperture depends strongly on the transverse dynamics. It is very sensitive to machine conditions such as the tunes, chromaticities, lattice symmetry, and spurious coupling, since depending on those conditions the Touschek scattered particles explore different resonance regions in the phase space. In light sources, the momentum aperture usually also depends strongly on the vertical physical aperture. Applying frequency analysis techniques in simulations and for turn-by-turn orbit measurement data provides a very powerful tool to measure and understand limitations of the dynamic momentum aperture. The techniques presented are applicable to other light sources, as well as damping rings and many types of colliders.