Ion bunch formation strategies for the JLEIC collider

An Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) has been proposed and supported as the next major nuclear physics facility in the United States, with very high design luminosities of 10^33 - 10^34 cm^-2 s^-1. The Jefferson Lab EIC concept, JLEIC, includes construction of a new ion beam accelerator complex. To achieve the required luminosity, the JLEIC ion collider requires unprecedentedly short ion bunches of 1 cm length at a high repetition frequency of 476 MHz. However, only much longer ion bunches are formed by the ion injector complex producing beams for the collider ring. Formation of short ion bunches from much longer ion bunches in this collider while limiting beam size growth is a fundamental challenge. This dissertation investigates several methods using longitudinal RF gymnastics to address this bunch formation challenge, including debunch/rebunch with barrier bucket manipulations and adiabatic bunch splitting. We discuss background of both methods, and show results of simulations that indicate that multiple adiabatic bunch splits are best suited to produce ion beam that satisfies the current JLEIC requirements. Adiabatic bunch splitting is also further optimized using genetic algorithms to find the optimum tradeoff between acceptable emittance growth and accelerator time necessary to perform the bunch formation process.