LBNL, Berkeley, California, USA
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
INFN/LASA, Segrate (MI), Italy
Science needs in the last decade have been pushing the accelerator community to the development of high repetition rates (MHz/GHz-class) linac-based schemes capable of generating high brightness electron beams. Examples include X-ray FELs; ERLs for light source, electron cooling and IR to EUV FEL applications; inverse Compton scattering X-ray or gamma sources; and ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy. The high repetition rate requirement has profound implications on the technology choice for most of the accelerator parts, and in particular for the electron gun. The successful performance of the GHz room-temperature RF photo-injectors running at rates <~ 100 Hz, cannot be scaled up to higher rates because of the excessive heat load that those regimes would impose on the gun cavity. In response to this gun need, we have developed at Berkeley the VHF-Gun, a lower-frequency room-temperature RF photo-gun capable of CW operation and optimized for the performance required by MHz-class X-ray FELs. The Advanced Photo-injector EXperiment (APEX) was funded and built for demonstrating the VHF gun performance, and the results of its last phase of commissioning are presented.
