Experimental Demonstration of Wakefield Acceleration in a Tunable Dielectric Loaded Accelerating Structure

We report on a collinear wakefield experiment using the first tunable dielectric loaded accelerating structure. By introducing an extra layer of nonlinear ferroelectric, which has a dielectric constant sensitive to temperature and dc bias, the frequency of a dielectric loaded accelerating structure can be tuned. During the experiment, the energy of a witness bunch at a fixed delay with respect to the drive beam was measured while the temperature of the structure was scanned over a 50 deg. C range. The energy change corresponded to a change of more than half of the nominal structure wavelength.