2022 has been a performance consolidation year for the Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) at CERN that demonstrated its capability of delivering the target beam parameters required for high luminosity production in the LHC in a reproducible and reliable way. The main steps that have led to the high performance reach of this beam, together with the machine stability improvements deployed, are detailed in this paper.

Antiprotons are generated at CERN by extracting a high-intensity proton beam from the Proton Synchrotron (PS) onto a target. The resulting antiprotons are captured in the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) ring. As the AD is about three times shorter than the PS, the entire primary proton beam must be compressed to less than one third of the PS circumference. The previous batch compression brought four bunches injected from the PS Booster (PSB) into consecutive RF buckets at a harmonic number of 20. An improved injection and compression scheme has been developed and commissioned to deliver five bunches to the AD. It became feasible thanks to the upgrades of the injector complex for the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC). One of the four PSB rings delivers twice higher intensity in two bunches, and an optimized sequence of nine different RF harmonics has been set up to obtain five bunches within one quarter of the PS circumference. The contribution summarizes the main changes to the antiproton production beam, as well as the experience of the first year of operation. Results of beam tests with increased total intensity are presented.

A key aspect of the LHC Injectors Upgrade project is the connection of the PSB to the newly built Linac4 and the related installation of a new 160\,MeV charge-exchange injection system. The new injection system was commissioned in winter 2020/21 and is now used operationally to tailor the transverse characteristics for the various beam types at CERN, such as high-intensity fixed target beams, LHC single bunch beams, and high-brightness beams for LHC. This contribution outlines the different injection strategies for producing the various beam types and discusses the application of numerical optimization algorithms to adjust injection settings in operation efficiently.

A new real-time measurement system for accelerator control, named FIRESTORM (Field In Real-time Streaming from Online Reference Magnets), to measure the integrated bending field has been recently deployed and commissioned in six synchrotron rings at CERN. We present the operational experience during the preparation phase and the restart of the accelerator complex for Run 3, focusing on the metrological performance of the new sensors and electronics, and on the lessons learned during commissioning. We also discuss the prospects for the evolution of the system and its adaptation to related use cases.

CERN’s digital Low-Level RF (LLRF) family for injectors is deployed on CERN’s PS Booster (PSB), Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR), Extra Low ENergy Antiproton (ELENA) ring and Antiproton Decelerator (AD). It implements multiple capabilities, including beam and cavity feedback loops, bunch shaping, longitudinal blowup, bunch splitting and longitudinal diagnostics. New capabilities are now available and the LLRF family is soon going to be deployed for tests also in CERN’s Proton Synchrotron (PS). This paper provides details on the operation and on the new capabilities of this LLRF family. Hints on future evolution are also given.

The longitudinal phase space tomography, which reconstructs the phase space distribution from the one-dimensional bunch profiles, is used in various accelerators to measure longitudinal beam parameters. At the J-PARC, an implementation of the phase space tomography based on the convolution back projection method has been used to measure the momentum spread of the injected beam. The method assumes that the beam distribution rotates without significant deformation during the synchrotron oscillation. Because of the nonlinearity of synchrotron motion with sinusoidal RF voltage, the method can be used only in limited situations such as small amplitude synchrotron oscillation. Algebraic Reconstruction Techniques (ART) in conjunction with particle tracking, which is implemented in CERN's tomography code, allows accurate reconstructions even for nonlinear large amplitude synchrotron oscillations. We present the overview of the application of CERN's tomography code to the J-PARC synchrotrons. The results of benchmarking are also reported.