| Beam emittance is an important characteristic describing charged particle beams. In linear accelerators (linac), it is critical to characterize the beam phase space parameters and, in particular, to precisely measure transverse beam emittance. The quadrupole scan (quad-scan) is a well-established technique used to characterize transverse beam parameters in four-dimensional phase space, including beam emittance. A computational algorithm with PYTHON scripts has been developed to estimate beam parameters, in particular beam emittance, using the quad-scan technique in the electron linac at the Fermilab Accelerator Science and Technology (FAST) facility. This script has been implemented in conjunction with an automated quad-scan tool (also written in PYTHON) and has decreased the time it takes to perform a single quad-scan from an hour to a few minutes. From the experimental data, the emittance calculator quickly delivers several results including: geometrical and normalized transverse emittance, Courant-Snyder parameters, and plots of the beam size versus quadrupole field strength, among others. This paper will discuss the details of the techniques used, the results from several quad-scans preformed at FAST during the electron injector commissioning, and the PYTHON code used to obtain the results. |
