Argonne Wakefield Accelerator facility upgrade

The Argonne Wakefield Accelerator has been successfully used for conducting wakefield experiments in dielectric loaded structures and plasmas. Although the initial wakefield experiments were successful, higher drive beam quality would substantially improve the wakefield accelerating gradients. For this reason we have built a new 1-1/2 cell L-band photocathode RF gun. This gun is expected to produce 10 - 100 nC bunches with 2 - 5 ps rms pulse length and normalized emittance less than 100 mm mrad. The gun will initially have a Cu photocathode, which will soon be replaced by a high quantum efficiency CsTe one, allowing the generation of a train of high charge bunches. The beam energy at the exit of the gun cavity will be in the range 7.5 - 10 MeV. A standing-wave linac structure operating at the same frequency (1.3 GHz) will increase the beam energy to about 15 MeV. This beam will be used in high gradient wakefield acceleration experiments and other high intensity electron beam applications. Travelling wave dielectric loaded structures, operating at 7.8 and 15.6 GHz, will be excited by the propagation of single bunches or by trains of up to 32 electron bunches, reaching gradients in excess of 100 MV/m over distances of the order of 1 meter.