Initial studies of Bremsstrahlung energy deposition in small-bore superconducting undulator structures in linac environments

One of the more promising technologies for developing minimal-length insertion devices for linac-driven, single-pass Free Electron Lasers (FELs) operating in the x-ray range is based on the use of superconducting (SC) materials. In recent FEL simulations, for example, a bifilar helical SC device with a 2 cm period and 1.8 T field was found to require a 30 m saturation length for operation at 1.5 Angstrom on a 15 GeV linac, more than 40% shorter than an alternative hybrid/permanent magnet (hybrid/PM) undulator. AT the same time, however, SC technology is known to present characteristic difficulties for insertion device design, both in engineering detail and in operation. Perhaps the most critical problem, as observed, e.g., by Madey and co-workers in their initial FEL experiments, was the frequent quenching induced by scattered electrons upstream of their (bifilar) device. Postulating that this quenching was precipitated by directly-scattered or bremsstrahlung-induced particle energy deposited into the SC material or into material contiguous with it, the importance of numerical and experimental characterizations of this phenomenon for linac-based, user-facility SC undulator design becomes evident. In this paper we discuss selected prior experimental results and report on initial EGS4 code studies of scattered and bremsstrahlung induced particle energy deposition into SC structures with geometries comparable to a small-bore bifilar helical undulator