Standing Wave Linear Accelerators: An Investigation of the Fundamental Field Stability and Tuning Characteristics

The first accelerators were designed as a tool in high-energy particle physics. Their development has given rise to numerous applications in industry, such as materials processing, sterilization, food preservation, and radiopharmaceutical product generation (Barbalat, 1994). Modern day linear accelerators for particle physics accelerate multiple bunches of electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV. Accelerators of the next generation, such as the Next Linear Collider (NLC), aim to accelerate the bunches initially to a center of mass of 500GeV and later to 1.5 TeV (Decking 2001, Miyamoto 2002, Phinney 2002). The NLC will operate under gradient fields on the order of 70 MV/m (Phinney, 2002). For all accelerators, two issues are fundamental for their construction: maximizing the efficiency of acceleration while, at the same time, preserving the luminosity of the beam. These issues are critically important in the design of the NLC. A linear accelerator operates as follows: An electron gun fires electrons into a structure that bunches the electrons and tightly focuses the beam. At the same time, a radiofrequency wave is fed into the accelerating structure. The electron bunches enter the accelerating structure in phase with the crest of the radiofrequency wave in order to achieve maximum energy. There are two principal types of accelerating structures: traveling wave (TW) and standing wave (SW). The electromagnetic wave in a TW structure travels in one direction; the electromagnetic wave in a SW structure travels in two directions. Many TW structures have been designed for the NLC, but recent experiments indicate that TW structures suffer from electrical breakdown at high gradients (Miller et. al., 2001). To address this problem, SW structures are being considered as the alternative for the NLC (Jones and Miller et. al., 2002). The input power required for an accelerating cavity increases with the length of the cavity (Miller et. al., 2001). Since SW structures can be made arbitrarily short without sacrificing efficiency, SW structures require a lower gradient to achieve the same accelerations as their TW wave counterparts