| An important area of application of high-power radio frequency (RF) and microwave sources is particle acceleration. A major challenge for the current worldwide research and development effort in linear accelerator is the search for a compact and affordable very-high-energy accelerator technology for the next generation supercolliders. It has been recognized for sometime that dielectric loaded accelerator structures are attractive candidates for the next generation very-high-energy linear accelerators, because they possess several distinct advantages over conventional metallic iris-loaded accelerator structures. However, some fundamental issues, such as RF breakdown in the dielectric, Joule heating, and vacuum properties of dielectric materials, are still the subjects of intense investigation, requiring the validation by experiments conducted at high power levels. An X-band traveling-wave accelerator based on dielectric-lined waveguide has been designed and constructed. Numerical calculation, bench measurements, and 3-D electromagnetic field simulation of this dielectric loaded accelerator are presented. One critical technical problem in constructing such dielectric loaded accelerator is efficient coupling of RF power into the dielectric-lined circular waveguide. A coupling scheme has been arrived at by empirical methods. Field distribution in this coupling configuration has been studied by numerical simulation. In the conventional iris-loaded accelerator structures, the peak surface electric field E s is in general found to be at least a factor of 2 higher than the axial acceleration field Ea. Because the peak surface electric field causes electric breakdown of the structure, it represents a direct limitation on the maximum acceleration gradient that can be obtained. A novel hybrid dielectric-iris-loaded periodic accelerator structure is proposed to utilize the advantages of both dielectric-lined waveguides and conventional iris-loaded structures. Numerical simulations show that this type of hybrid accelerator structure can reduce the peak surface electric field on the iris by more than a factor of two without diminishing much in the shunt impedance and the quality factor. This research program addressed the fundamental issues and engineering challenges of dielectric-loaded accelerator structures. Dielectric loaded accelerator structures could be a promising alternative to the conventional designs. |
