NRL, Washington, DC, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
Icarus Research, Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
A joint program is under way to study externally driven X-band dielectric-loaded accelerating (DLA) structures and CLIC-type power extraction structures. The structures are designed and fabricated by Argonne National Laboratory and Euclid Techlabs and tested at up to 20 MW drive power using the X-band Magnicon Facility at the Naval Research Laboratory, with additional tests carried out at SLAC. Thus far, tests have been carried out on a large variety of structures fabricated from quartz, alumina, and MCT-20, and the principal problems have been multipactor loading and rf breakdown.* Multipactor loading occurs on the inner surface of the dielectric in a region of strong normal and tangential rf electric fields; rf breakdown occurs principally at discontinuities in the dielectric. Gap-free DLA structures have been tested at 15 MV/m without breakdown. New tests are being prepared to address these two issues. New gap-free structures will make use of a metallic coating on the outer surface of the dielectric in order to permit tapering both the inner and outer diameters for rf matching, while new multipactor studies will examine the use of grooved surfaces to suppress multipactor.
* C. Jing, W. Gai, J.G. Power, R. Konecny, W. Liu, S.H. Gold, A.K. Kinkead, S.G. Tantawi, V. Dolgashev, and A. Kanareykin, IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci., vol. 38, pp. 1354–1360, June 2010.
ANL, Argonne, USA
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois, USA
The AWA Facility is presently undergoing several upgrades that will enable it to further study wakefield acceleration driven by high charge electron beams. The facility employs an L-band photocathode RF gun to generate high charge short electron bunches, which are used to drive wakefields in dielectric loaded structures as well as in metallic structures (iris loaded, photonic band gap, etc). Several facility upgrades are underway: (a) a new RF gun with a higher quantum efficiency photocathode will replace the RF gun that has been used to generate the drive bunches; (b) the existing RF gun will be used to generate a witness beam to probe the wakefields; (c) three new L-band RF power stations, each providing 25 MW, will be added to the facility; (d) five linac structures will be added to the drive beamline, bringing the beam energy up from 15 MeV to 75 MeV. The drive beam will consist of bunch trains of up to 32 bunches spaced by 0.77 ns with up to 100 nC per bunch. The goal of future experiments is to reach accelerating gradients of several hundred MV/m and to extract RF pulses with GW power level.
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
IIT, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Significant progress has been made in the development of high gradient rf driven dielectric accelerating structures (DLA). One principal effect limiting further advances in this technology is the problem of multipactor. The fraction of the power absorbed at saturation in DLA experiments was found to increase with the incident power, with more than 30% of the incident power per unit length being absorbed. We studied a possibility of multipactor mitigation by introduction of surface grooves (transverse and longitudinal) to interrupt the resonant trajectories of electrons in the multipactor discharge. Four DLA structures based on quartz tubes with transverse and longitudinal grooves of various dimensions were designed. In this paper we report simulation results and plans for high-power tests of these structures.
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
In the past decade, tremendous efforts have been put into the development of the CLIC Power Extraction and Transfer Structure (PETS), and significant progress has been made. However, one concern remains the manufacturing cost of the PETS, particularly considering the quantities needed for a TeV machine. A dielectric-based wakefield power extractor in principle is much cheaper to build. A low surface electric field to gradient ratio is another big advantage of the dielectric-loaded accelerating/decelerating structure. We are currently investigating the possibility of using a cost-effective dielectric-based wakefield power extractor as an alternative to the CLIC PETS. We designed a 12 GHz dielectric-based power extractor which has a similar performance to CLIC PETS with parameters 23 mm beam channel, 240 ns pulse duration, 135 MW output per structure using the CLIC drive beam. In order to study potential rf breakdown issues, as a first step we are building a 11.424 GHz dielectric-based power extractor scaled from the 12 GHz version, and plan to perform a high power rf test using the SLAC 11.424 GHz high power rf source.
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
We report on a collinear wakefield experiment using the first tunable dielectric loaded accelerating structure. Dielectric-based accelerators are generally lacking in approaches to tune the frequency after fabrication. However, by introducing an extra layer of nonlinear ferroelectric which has a dielectric constant sensitive to temperature and DC voltage, the frequency of a DLA structure can be tuned on the fly by controlling the temperature or DC bias. The experiment demonstrated that by varying the temperature of the structure over a 50°C temperature range, the energy of a witness bunch at a fixed delay with respect to the drive beam could be changed by an amount corresponding to more than half of the nominal structure wavelength.
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
We report here on the development of THz diamond wakefield structures produced using Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) technology*. The diamond structures would be used in a THz generation experiment at the new FACET facility at SLAC. We consider a dielectric based accelerating structure to study of the physical limitations encountered driving >GV/m wakefields in the cylindrical and planar geometries of a dielectric wakefield accelerator (DWA). In a DWA, an ultrashort drive bunch traverses the evacuated central region of the structure, creating Cherenkov wakefields in the dielectric to accelerate a witness bunch. A diamond-based DWA structure will allow a sustained accelerating gradient exceeding breakdown threshold demonstrated with the FFTB experiments**. The electrical and mechanical properties of diamond make it an ideal candidate material for use in dielectric rf structures: high breakdown voltage, extremely low dielectric losses and the highest thermoconductive coefficient available for removing waste heat from the device.
*R. J. Barker et al., Modern Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Power Electronics, IEEE Press/Wiley-Interscience, Piscataway NJ 2005, Chapter 7
**M.C. Thompson et al. Phys. Rev.Lett.100:214801, 2008.
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
Diamond has been proposed as a dielectric material for dielectric loaded accelerating (DLA) structures. It has a very low microwave loss tangent, the highest available thermoconductive coefficient and high RF breakdown field. In this paper we report the results from a wakefield breakdown test of diamond-loaded rectangular accelerating structure and development of a cylindrical diamond DLA. We expect to achieve field levels on the order of 100 MV/m in the structure using the 100nC beam at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator Facility. Single crystal diamond plates produced by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) are used in the structure. The structure is designed to yield up to 0.5 GV/m fields on the diamond surface to test it for breakdown. A surface analysis of the diamond is performed before and after the beam test.
Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
In a general sense, a high gradient is desirable for a TeV level linear collider design because it can reduce the total linac length. More importantly, the efficiency and the cost to sustain such a gradient should be considered as well in the optimization process of an overall design. We propose a high energy linear collider based on a short rf pulse (~22ns flat top), high gradient (~267MV/m loaded gradient), high frequency (26GHz) dielectric two beam accelerator scheme. This scheme is a modular design and its unique locally repetitive drive beam structure allows a flexible configuration to meet different needs. Major parameters of a conceptual 3-TeV linear collider are presented. This preliminary study shows an efficient (~7% overall ) short pulse collider may be achievable. As the first step, a dielectric based broadband accelerating structure is under development.