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.
Yale University, Beam Physics Laboratory, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
ANL, Argonne, USA
Omega-P, Inc., New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Columbia University, New York, USA
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA
NSC/KIPT, Kharkov, Ukraine
Recent tests of a two-channel rectangular dielectric lined accelerator structure are described; comparison with theory and related issues are presented. The structure (with channel width ratio 6:1) is designed to have a maximum transformer ratio of ~12.5:1. It operates mainly in the LSM31 mode (~ 30GHz). The dielectric liner is cordierite (dielectric constant ~4.76). The acceleration gradient is 1.2 MV/m for each 10nC of the drive bunch for the first acceleration peak of the wakefield, and 0.92 MV/m for the second peak. The structure is installed into the AWA beam-line (Argonne National Lab) and is excited by a single 10-50nC, 14MeV drive bunch. Both the drive bunch and a delayed witness bunch are produced at the same photocathode. This is the first experiment to test a two-channel dielectric rectangular wakefield device where the accelerated bunch may be continuously energized by the drive bunch. The immediate experimental objective is to observe the energy gain and spread, and thereby draw conclusions from the experimental results and the theory model predictions. The observed energy change of the test bunch might be well explained*.
* G. V. Sotnikov, et al., Advanced Accelerator Concepts: 13th Workshop, Carl B. Schroeder, Wim Leemans and Eric Esarey, editors, AIP Conf. Proc. 1086), pp. 415–420 (AIP, New York, 2009).
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.
