Commissioning of the Multipole Injection Kicker in the MAX IV 1.5 GeV ring

The Multipole Injection Kicker (MIK) installed in the 3 GeV ring of MAX IV, is a success story in the use of a non-linear field device ensuring an almost transparent injection into the first ever built fourth-generation storage ring. Reducing the transient stored beam perturbations during top-up injections is particularly relevant for such machines operating at emittances in the regime of few hundred pm.rad, however it maintains its significant impact also when operated with more ordinary third-generation storage rings, ensuring large injection efficiencies, more frequent top-ups and of course minimal disturbance of the stored beam during injection, particularly important when operating long period insertion devices in the minimum gap region. Following the expertise matured during the years of operation in our 3 GeV machine, we installed and commissioned a MIK in the 1.5 GeV ring, which provides injection efficiencies larger than 90%, top-ups every 10 min and beam size variations smaller than 10 % in both planes. The paper reports about the progress done from the initial beam dynamics evaluations, passing through the installation of the device and its daily operations, up to the final tests with the beamlines meant to evaluate its performance from the user’s point of view.