Experimental Demonstration of Compensation of Beam-Beam Effects by Electron Lenses

We report the first experimental demonstration of compensation of beam-beam interaction effects in high-energy particle collider by using space-charge forces of a low-energy electron beam. In our experiments, an electron lens, a novel instrument developed for the beam-beam compensation, was set on a 980-GeV proton bunch in the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider. The proton bunch losses due to its interaction with antiproton beam were reduced by a factor of 2 when the electron lens was operating. We describe the principle of electron lens operation and present experimental results.