MIT/PSFC, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
Euclid TechLabs, Solon, Ohio, USA
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA
We present our recent results generating 510 MW of power at 11.7 GHz using a metamaterial-based metallic power-extractor for application in structure-based wakefield acceleration (SWFA). SWFA is a novel acceleration scheme in which high-charge electron bunches are passed through a power extractor structure to produce a high-intensity wakefield. This wakefield can then be used to accelerate a witness bunch in the same beamline or passed to a separate acceleration beamline. MIT’s approach uses a specialized metamaterial for the power extractor design. By using a metamaterial, we can overcome some of the challenges faced by other SWFA techniques. Here, we discuss the Stage 3 experiment. The Stage 1 and Stage 2 experiments successfully demonstrated the functionality of the metamaterial approach by generating high power RF pulses using the 65 MeV electron beam at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) facility. The 510 MW result from Stage 3 experiment is the highest power generated to-date for SWFA at AWA, and was enable by significant design improvements, including an all-copper structure, fully-symmetric coupler design, and breakdown risk-reduction treatment.
