Evidence for anomalous optical transition radiation linear polarization effects in beam-profile monitors

Abstract

Investigations of the effects of optical transition radiation (OTR) polarization components on beam profiles are presented. The transverse profiles are examined using the OTR perpendicular and parallel polarization components with respect to the dimension of interest. We observed ∼15% projected profile size reductions with the perpendicularly polarized components on a 65−μm beam image size case at 14 MeV, a 150−μm beam image size at 4.5 GeV, and a 1100−μm beam image size at 7 GeV. These effects are all several times larger than expected (and anomalous in this sense) when compared to the standard OTR point-spread function calculations. We propose the time-averaged induced-current distribution which generates the OTR represents the actual beam size more faithfully with the perpendicular polarization component and recommend its routine use and subsequent deconvolution.