EFFECT OF HIGH SOLENOIDAL MAGNETIC FIELDS ON BREAKDOWN

There is an on going international collaboration studying the feasibility and cost of building a muon collider or neutrino factory [1,2]. An important aspect of this study is the full understanding of ionization cooling of muons by many orders of magnitude for the collider case. An important muon ionization cooling experiment, MICE [3], has been proposed to demonstrate and validate the technology that could be used for cooling. Ionization cooling is accomplished by passing a high-emittance muon beam alternately through regions of low Z material, such as liquid hydrogen, and very high accelerating RF Cavities within a multi-Tesla solenoidal field. To determine the effect of very large solenoidal magnetic fields on the generation of dark current, x-rays and on the breakdown voltage gradients of vacuum RF cavities, a test facility has been established at Fermilab in Lab G. This facility consists of a 12 MW 805 MHz RF station and a large warm bore 5 T solenoidal superconducting magnet containing a pill box type cavity with thin removable window apertures. This system allowes dark current and breakdown studies of different window configurations and materials. The results of this study will be presented. The study has shown that the peak achievable accelerating gradient is reduced by a factor greater than 2 when solenoidal field of greater than 2 T are applied to the cavity