RF system developments for CW and/or long pulse linacs

High Power Proton Linacs are under development or proposed for development at Los Alamos and elsewhere. By current standards these linacs all require very large amounts of RF power. The Accelerator for Production of Tritium (APT) is a CW accelerator with an output current and energy of 100 mA and 1,700 MeV, respectively. The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), in its ultimate configuration, is a pulsed accelerator with an average output power of 4 MW of beam. Other accelerators such as those that address transmutation and upgrades to LANSCE have similar requirements. For these high average power applications, the RF systems represent approximately half of the total cost of the linac and are thus key elements in the design and configuration of the accelerator. Los Alamos is fortunate to be actively working on both APT and SNS. For these programs the author is pursuing a number of component developments which are aimed at one or more of the key issues for large RF systems: technical performance, capital cost, reliability, and operating efficiency. This paper briefly describes some of the linac applications and then provides updates on the key RF developments being pursued