Trapping of particles in nonlinear resonances in the presence of space charge and synchrotron motion may be a source of beam halo generation and beam loss in high intensity synchrotrons, in particular for extended storage times at the injection plateau as planned for the SIS100 synchrotron of the FAIR project. Although extensive simulation studies have theoretically demonstrated this mechanism, experimental evidence was so far limited to demonstration experiments at the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) in 2002-2003 using an octupolar resonance. Here we describe new experiments at the SIS18 synchrotron at GSI, where the resonance is driven by a sextupolar field error and horizontal static tune scans are taken across the resonance stop band. The new data significantly extend the previous observations by a complete set of measurements comparing beams with and without rf, both at low and high intensity. The correlation between transverse beam loss and simultaneous bunch length shortening provides strong evidence that the measured emittance and the loss in intensity are indeed caused by periodic resonance crossing, leading to the main effect of scattering but also to a lesser extent to the trapping of particles due to the combined effect of the nonlinear resonance and the space charge.

Two different tune measurement systems have been installed in the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung heavy-ion synchrotron SIS-18. Tune spectra are obtained with high accuracy using these fast and sensitive systems. Besides the machine tune, the spectra contain information about the intensity dependent coherent tune shift and the incoherent space charge tune shift. The space charge tune shift is derived from a fit of the observed shifted positions of the synchrotron satellites to an analytic expression for the head-tail eigenmodes with space charge. Furthermore, the chromaticity is extracted from the measured head-tail mode structure. The results of the measurements provide experimental evidence of the importance of space charge effects and head-tail modes for the interpretation of transverse beam signals at high intensity.

The stability of longitudinal dipole oscillations in Gaussian bunches is studied for different rf wave forms and with nonlinear space charge. In a previous study [O. Boine-Frankenheim and T. Shukla, Phys. Rev. ST Accel. Beams 8, 034201 (2005)], the space charge induced loss of Landau damping and the bunch response to rf phase modulations was analyzed for elliptic distributions. The present study investigates Landau damping of dipole modes with nonlinear space charge in Gaussian bunches. The stability boundary resulting from a dispersion relation is compared with stability scans performed within a selfconsistent simulation scheme. The results are compared with numerically obtained beam transfer functions.

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