Experimental Study Of X-band Dielectric-loaded Accelerating Structures

A joint Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)/Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) program is under way to investigate X- band dielectric-loaded accelerating (DLA) structures, using high-power 11.424GHz radiation from the NRL Magnicon facility. As an advanced accelerator concepts, the dielectric-loaded accelerator offers the potential for a simple, inexpensive alternative to high-gradient RF linear accelerators. In this thesis, a comprehensive account of X-band DLA structure design, including theoretical calculation, numerical simulation, fabrication and testing, is presented in detail. Two types of loading dielectrics, alumina and MgxCa1−xTiO 3 (MCT), are investigated. For alumina (with dielectric constant 9.4), no RF breakdown has been observed up to 5 MW of drive power (equivalent to 8MV/m accelerating gradient) in the high power RF testing at NRL, but multipactor was observed to absorb a large fraction of the incident microwave power. Experimental results on suppression of multipactor using TiN coating on the inner surface of the dielectric are also reported. For MCT (with dielectric constant 20), although we did not observe dielectric breakdown in the structures, breakdown did occur at the ceramic joint, where the electric field is greatly enhanced (estimated to be around 100MV/m) due to the micro-scale vacuum gap. In addition, the MCT structure showed significantly less multipactor for the same level of RF field. The thesis also introduced a new design, a multilayered dielectric-loaded accelerating structure, to improve the performance over the conventional one layer DLA structure. Results of analysis for the case of a four layered DLA structure indicate a large reduction of RF power attenuation and an increase of shunt impedance for the structure. Beyond the main contents, the appendices of the thesis present two individual projects prompted by the experimental study of the dielectric-loaded accelerating structure. Appendix A shows a resonant loop technique that can be used in the bead-pull experiment on any cavity resonator. In appendix B, a direct wakefield measurement of the dielectric-loaded waveguide on the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator beamline is described