Real-time Artificial Intelligence for Accelerator Control: A Study at the Fermilab Booster

14 Nov 2020  ·  Jason St. John, Christian Herwig, Diana Kafkes, Jovan Mitrevski, William A. Pellico, Gabriel N. Perdue, Andres Quintero-Parra, Brian A. Schupbach, Kiyomi Seiya, Nhan Tran, Malachi Schram, Javier M. Duarte, Yunzhi Huang, Rachael Keller ·

We describe a method for precisely regulating the gradient magnet power supply at the Fermilab Booster accelerator complex using a neural network trained via reinforcement learning. We demonstrate preliminary results by training a surrogate machine-learning model on real accelerator data to emulate the Booster environment, and using this surrogate model in turn to train the neural network for its regulation task. We additionally show how the neural networks to be deployed for control purposes may be compiled to execute on field-programmable gate arrays. This capability is important for operational stability in complicated environments such as an accelerator facility.

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