• M.E. Conde, S.P. Antipov, W. Gai, C.-J. Jing, R. Konecny, W. Liu, J.G. Power, H. Wang, Z.M. Yusof
  ANL, Argonne, Illinois

The Argonne Wakefield Accelerator Facility (AWA) is dedicated to the study of electron beam physics and the development of accelerating structures based on electron beam driven wakefields. In order to carry out these studies, the facility employs a photocathode RF gun capable of generating electron beams with high bunch charges (up to 100 nC) and short bunch lengths. This high intensity beam is used to excite wakefields in the structures under investigation. The wakefield structures presently under development are dielectric loaded cylindrical waveguides with operating frequencies of 7.8 or 15.6 GHz. The facility is also used to investigate the generation and propagation of high brightness electron beams. Presently under investigation, is the use of photons with energies lower than the work function of the cathode surface (Schottky-enabled photoemission), aimed at generating electron beams with low thermal emittance. Novel electron beam diagnostics are also developed and tested at the facility. The AWA electron beam is also used in laboratory-based astrophysics experiments; namely, measurements of microwave Cherenkov radiation and fluorescence of air. We report on the current status of the facility and present recent results.

• S.P. Antipov, W. Liu, J.G. Power
  ANL, Argonne, Illinois
• L.K. Spentzouris
  Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois

Recently, there has been a growing interest in applying artificial materials, known as Left-Handed Metamaterials (LHM), to accelerator physics. These materials have both negative permittivity and permeability and therefore possess several unusual properties: the index of refraction is negative and the direction of the group velocity is antiparallel to the direction of the phase velocity (along k). These properties lead to a reverse Cherenkov effect, which has potential beam diagnostic applications, in addition to accelerator applications. Several LHM devices with different configurations are being experimentally and theoretically studied at Argonne. In this paper, we describe permittivity and permeability retrieval techniques that we have developed and applied to these devices. We have also investigated the possibility of building a Cherenkov detector based on LHM and propose an experiment to observe the reverse radiation generated by an electron beam passing through a LHM. The potential advantage of a LHM detector is that the radiation in this case is emitted in the direction reversed to the direction of the beam, so it could be easier to get a clean measurement.