Conceptual Design of Dielectric Accelerating Structures for Intense Neutron and Monochromatic X-ray Sources

Bright compact photon sources, which utilize electron beam interaction with periodic structures, may benefit a broad range of medical, industrial and scientific applications. A class of dielectric-loaded periodic structures for hard and soft X-ray production has been proposed that would provide a high accelerating gradient when excited by an external RF and/or primary electron beam. Target-distributed accelerators (TDA), in which an additional electric field compensates for lost beam energy in internal targets, have been shown to provide the necessary means to drive a high flux subcritical reactor (HFSR) for nuclear waste transmutation. The TDA may also be suitable for positron and nuclear isomer production, X-ray lithography and monochromatic computer tomography. One of the early assumptions of the theory of dielectric wake-field acceleration was that, in electrodynamics, the vector potential was proportional to the scalar potential. The analysis takes into consideration a wide range of TDA design aspects including the wave model of observed phenomena, a layered compound separated by a Van der Waals gap and a compact energy source based on fission electric cells (FEC) with a multistage collector. The FEC is a high-voltage power source that directly converts the kinetic energy of the fission fragments into electrical potential of about 2MV