High Intensity Beams from the CERN PS Booster

The CERN Proton Synchrotron Booster (PSB) has been running for more than 30 years. Originally designed to accelerate particles from 50 to 800 MeV, later upgraded to an energy of 1 GeV and finally 1.4 GeV, it is steadily being pushed to its operational limits. One challenge is the permanent demand for intensity increase, in particular for CNGS and ISOLDE, but also in view of Linac4. As it is an accelerator working with very high space charge during the low energy part of its cycle, its operational conditions have to be precisely tuned. Amongst other things resonances must be avoided, stop band crossings optimised and the machine impedance minimised. Recently, an operational intensity record was achieved with >4.25 10 13 protons accelerated. An orbit correction campaign performed during the 2007/2008 shutdown was a major contributing factor to achieving this intensity. As the PSB presently has very few orbit correctors available, the orbit correction has to be achieved by displacing and/or tilting some of the defocusing quadrupoles common to all 4 PSB rings. The contributing factors used to optimise performance will be reviewed.