THYBB5
RadiaBeam, Santa Monica, California, USA
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
RadiaBeam Systems, Santa Monica, California, USA
MIT/PSFC, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
The development of novel mm-wave accelerating structures with > 200 MV/m gradients offers a promising path to reduce the cost and footprint of future TeV-scale linear colliders, as well as linacs for industrial, medical and security applications. The major factor limiting accelerating gradient is vacuum RF breakdown. The probability of such breakdowns increases with pulse length. For reliable operation, millimeter-wave structures require nanoseconds long pulses at the megawatt level. This power is available from gyrotrons, which have a minimum pulse length on the order of microseconds. In this paper, we will describe the laser-based RF switch capable of selecting 10 ns long pulses out of the microseconds long gyrotron pulses, thus enabling the use of the gyrotrons as power sources for mm-wave high gradient linac. The principle of operation of this device and its achieved parameters will be discussed. We will also report on the experimental demonstration of the RF switch with the high power gyrotron at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
