THE ELENA ELECTRON COOLER : PARAMETER CHOICE AND EXPECTED PERFORMANCE

Electron cooling will be central to the success of the ELENA project which aims to increase by a factor of up to 100 the number of antiprotons available for the trap experiments. Because of the tight space constraints, the design of the device will be based on the compact electron cooler in operation on the S-LSR ring in Kyoto. The biggest challenge will be to generate a cold and stable electron beam at an energy of just 55 eV in order to cool the 100 keV antiprotons. The use of photocathodes is excluded because their relatively short lifetime would require too many vacuum interventions during operation. We present the design parameters of our cooler as well as the results of the cooling performance simulations made with BetaCool and on-going work into "cold" cathodes.