Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The MAX IV facility includes two storage rings operated at 1.5 GeV and 3 GeV, which are both designed to operate with a uniform, multibunch fill pattern. Both rings have a 100 MHz RF system and employ passive harmonic cavities to damp instabilities and increase Touschek lifetime. Recently, a discussion on timing modes at the MAX IV storage rings has been initiated by the user community. Creating opportunities for timing experiments implies operating the rings with other fill patterns than the planned multibunch mode. Such operation can, however, cause transient effects in the passive harmonic cavities which affect the performance of the machine. It is therefore of interest to study the effect on the beam when operating with non-uniform fill patterns. This paper presents bunch length measurements at the 100 MHz MAX II storage ring for fill patterns with gaps. The purpose of the measurements was to evaluate the employed measurement method and simulation codes for future studies of various alternate fill patterns in the MAX IV storage rings.