Experimental evidence of adiabatic splitting of charged particle beams using stable islands of transverse phase space

Recently, a novel technique to perform multi-turn extraction from a circular particle accelerator was proposed. It is based on beam splitting and trapping, induced by a slow crossing of a nonlinear resonance, inside stable islands of transverse phase space. Experiments at the CERN Proton Synchrotron started in 2002 and evidence of beam splitting was obtained by summer 2004. In this paper the measurement results achieved with both a low- and a high-intensity, single-bunch proton beam are presented.