ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
UW-Madison/PD, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Argonne National Laboratory is developing a Sub-THz AcceleRator (A-STAR) for a future multiuser x-ray free electron laser facility. The A-STAR machine will utilize a compact collinear wakefield accelerator (CWA) based on a miniature copper (Cu) corrugated waveguide as proposed*. The accelerator is designed to operate at a 20-kHz bunch repetition rate and will utilize the 180-GHz wakefield of a 10-nC electron drive bunch with a field gradient of 100 MVm’1 to accelerate a 0.3-nC electron witness bunch to 5 GeV. In this paper, we discuss specific challenges in the mechanical design of the CWA vacuum chamber module. The module consists of series of small quadrupole magnets with a high magnetic field gradient that houses a 2-mm diameter and 0.5-m-long corrugated tubing with brazed water-cooling channels and a transition section. The 45-mm-long transition section is used to extract the wakefield and to house a beam position monitor, a bellows assembly and a port to connect a vacuum pump. The CWA vacuum chamber module requires four to five brazing steps with filler metals of successively lower temperatures to maintain the integrity of previously brazed joints.
*A. Zholents et al., "A conceptual design of a Compact Wakefield Accelerator for a high repetition rate multi user Xray Free-Electron Laser Facility," in Proc. IPAC’18, Canada, 2018, pp. 1266~1268.
