Paper detail

Statistical properties of undulator radiation in the IOTA storage ring

We study turn-by-turn fluctuations in the number of spontaneously emitted photons from an undulator, installed in the Integrable Optics Test Accelerator (IOTA) electron storage ring at Fermilab. A theoretical model is presented, showing the relative contributions due to the discrete nature of light emission and to the incoherent sum of fields from different electrons in the bunch. The model is compared with a previous experiment at Brookhaven and with new experiments we carried out at IOTA. Our experiments focused on the case of a large number of longitudinal and transverse radiation modes, a regime where photon shot noise is significant and the total magnitude of the fluctuations is very small. The experimental and data analysis techniques, required to reach the desired sensitivity, are detailed. We discuss how the model and the experiment provide insights into this emission regime, enable diagnostics of small beam sizes, and improve our understanding of beam lifetime in IOTA.