SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
MIT/PSFC, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
AAI/ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
UNIST, Ulsan, Republic of Korea
We present experimental studies of metamaterial (MTM) structures for wakefield acceleration. The MTM structure is an all-metal periodic structure with its period much smaller than the wavelength at X-band. The fundamental TM mode has a negative group velocity, so an electron beam traveling through the structure radiates by reversed Cherenkov radiation. Two experiments have been completed at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA), namely the Stage-I and Stage-II experiments. Differences between the two experiments include: (1) Structure length (Stage-I 8 cm, Stage-II 20 cm); (2) Bunch number used to excite the structure (Stage-I up to 2 bunches, Stage-II up to 8 bunches). In the Stage-I experiment, two bunches with a total charge of 85 nC generated 80 MW of RF power in a 2 ns long pulse. In the Stage-II experiment, the highest peak power reached 380 MW in a 10 ns long pulse from a train of 8 bunches with a total charge of 224 nC. Acceleration of a witness bunch has not been demonstrated yet, but the extracted power can be transferred to a separate accelerator for two-beam acceleration or directly applied to a trailing witness bunch in the same structure for collinear acceleration.
