COMMISSIONING OF S-BAND RF GUN AND LINAC FOR THE MARK-III FEL FACILITY AT DUKE UNIVERSITY

At the Free Electron Laser (FEL) Laboratory of Duke University, there is an S-band linac based Mark III FEL facility which can supply coherent FEL photon in the in-frared wavelength range. To supply high quality electron beams and to have excellent pulse structure, we installed an S-band RF gun with a Lanthanum Hexaboride (LaB6) sin-gle crystal cathode for the Mark III FEL facility in 2005. Its longest macropulse length is about 6 μs, and maxi-mum repetition rates of a macropulse and a micropulse are 15 Hz and 2856 MHz, respectively. Therefore we can gen-erate about 17142 bunches within a bunch train and about 257142 bunches within one second by the S-band gun. In this paper, we describe recent commissioning experiences of our newly installed S-band RF gun and linac for the Mark III FEL facility