Commissioning of the harmonic cavities in the MAX IV 3 GeV ring

The MAX IV 3 GeV storage ring operates with beam of high current and ultralow emittance. These beam parameters in combination with the small effective aperture enhance possible collective beam instabilities. Three passive harmonic cavities are installed to introduce bunch lengthening and tune spread, leading to decoupling of the bunch spectrum from the machine effective impedance and mitigating instabilities by Landau damping respectively. In this paper we present the first results of the commissioning of the passive third harmonic cavities in the MAX IV 3 GeV ring. The additional harmonic cavity potential significantly improved the beam lifetime. First observations of the harmonic cavity effect on the damping of collective beam instabilities are discussed.