A STUDY OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PARTICULATE CLEANING PROTOCOLS ON INTENTIONALLY CONTAMINATED NIOBIUM SURFACES*

Particulate contamination on the surface of SRF cavities is known to limit their performance via the enhanced generation of field-emitted electrons. Considerable efforts are expended to actively clean and avoid such contamination on niobium surfaces. The protocols in active use have been developed via feedback from cavity testing. This approach has the risk of over-conservatively ratcheting an ever increasing complexity of methods which are found to result in adequate cavity performance in particular circumstances. A complementary and perhaps helpful approach is to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of candidate methods at removing intentional representative particulate contamination. Toward this end, we developed a standardized contamination protocol using water suspensions of Nb2O5 and SS 316 powders applied to BCP’d surfaces of standardized niobium samples which resulted in particle densities of order 100 particles/mm2. From these common starting conditions, controlled application of high pressure water rinse, ultrasonic cleaning, or CO2 snow jet cleaning were applied and the resulting surfaces examined via SEM/scanning EDS with particle recognition software. Preliminary results comparing these methods and selected parametric variations of each are reported