Room temperature accelerator structures for linear colliders

Abstract

Early tests of short low group velocity and standing wave structures indicated the viability of operating X-band linacs with accelerating gradients in excess of 100 MeV/m. Conventional scaling of traveling wave traveling wave linacs with frequency scales the cell dimensions with /spl lambda/. Because Q scales as /spl lambda//sup 1/2/, the length of the structures scale not linearly but as /spl lambda//sup 3/2/ in order to preserve the attenuation through each structure. For the NLC we chose not to follow this scaling from the SLAC S-band linac to its fourth harmonic at the X-band. We wanted to increase the length of the structures to reduce the number of couplers and waveguide drives which can be a significant part of the cost of a microwave linac. Furthermore, scaling the iris size of the disk-loaded structures gave unacceptably high short range dipole wakefields. Consequently, we chose to go up a factor of about 5 in average group velocity and length of the structures, which increases the power fed to each structure by the same factor and decreases the short range dipole wakes by a similar factor. Unfortunately, these longer (1.8 m) structures have not performed nearly as well in high gradient tests as the short structures. We believe we have at least a partial understanding of the reason and will discuss it below. We are now studying two types of short structures with large apertures with moderately good efficiency including: 1) traveling wave structures with the group velocity lowered by going to large phase advance per period with bulges on the iris, 2) /spl pi/ mode standing wave structures.