Pavel Evtushenko

High power operation of the JLab IR FEL driver accelerator

Operation of the JLab IR Upgrade FEL at CW powers in excess of 10 kW requires sustained production of high electron beam powers by the driver ERL. This in turn demands attention to numerous issues and effects, including: cathode lifetime; control of beamline and RF system vacuum during high current operation; longitudinal space charge; longitudinal and transverse matching of irregular/large volume phase space distributions; halo management; management of remnant dispersive effects; resistive wall, wake-field, and RF heating of beam vacuum chambers; the beam break up instability; the impact of coherent synchrotron radiation (both on beam quality and the performance of laser optics); magnetic component stability and reproducibility; and RF stability and reproducibility. We discuss our experience with these issues and describe the modus vivendi that has evolved during prolonged high current, high power beam and laser operation.

DC High Voltage Conditioning of Photoemission Guns at Jefferson Lab FEL

DC high voltage photoemission electron guns with GaAs photocathodes have been used to produce polarized electron beams for nuclear physics experiments for about 3 decades with great success. In the late 1990s, Jefferson Lab adopted this gun technology for a free electron laser (FEL), but to assist with high bunch charge operation, considerably higher bias voltage is required compared to the photoguns used at the Jefferson Lab Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. The FEL gun has been conditioned above 400 kV several times, albeit encountering non‐trivial challenges with ceramic insulators and field emission from electrodes. Recently, high voltage processing with krypton gas was employed to process very stubborn field emitters. This work presents a summary of the high voltage techniques used to high voltage condition the Jefferson Lab FEL photoemission gun.

RF Gun optimization study

Injector gun design is an iterative process where the designer optimizes a few nonlinearly interdependent beam parameters to achieve the required beam quality for a particle accelerator. Few tools exist to automate the optimization process and thoroughly explore the parameter space. The challenging beam requirements of new accelerator applications such as light sources and electron cooling devices drive the development of RF and SRF photo injectors. RF and SRF gun design is further complicated because the beam is space charge dominated. A genetic algorithm (GA) has been successfully used to optimize DC photo injector designs at Cornell University [1] and Jefferson Lab [2]. We propose studying how GA techniques can be applied to the design of RF and SRF gun injectors. In this paper, we report on the initial phase of the study where we model and optimize a system that has been benchmarked with beam measurements and simulation.

National high magnetic field laboratory fel injector design consideration

A numerical study of beam dynamics was performed for two injector systems for the proposed National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the Florida State University (FSU) Free Electron Laser (FEL) facility. The first considered a system consisting of a thermionic DC gun, two buncher cavities operated at 260 MHz and 1.3 GHz and two TESLA type cavities, and is very similar to the injector of the ELBE Radiation Source. The second system we studied uses a DC photogun (a copy of JLab FEL electron gun), one buncher cavity operated at 1.3 GHz and two TESLA type cavities. The study is based on PARMELA simulations and takes into account operational experience of both the JLab FEL and the Radiation Source ELBE. The simulations predict the second system will have a much smaller longitudinal emittance. For this reason the DC photo gun based injector is preferred for the proposed FSU FEL facility.

Bunch Length Measurements at the JLab FEL Using Coherent Transition and Synchrotron Radiation

The JLab FEL is routinely operated with sub‐picosecond bunches. The short bunch length is important for high gain of the FEL. Coherent transition radiation has been used for the bunch length measurements for many years. This diagnostic can be used only in the pulsed beam mode. It is our goal to run the FEL with CW beam and a 74.85 MHz micropulse repetition rate, which, with the 135 pC nominal bunch charge corresponds to the beam average current of 10 mA, Hence it is very desirable to have the possibility of making bunch length measurements when running CW beam with any micropulse frequency. We use a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) interferometer, which is essentially a Michelson interferometer, to measure the spectrum of the coherent synchrotron radiation generated in the last dipole of the magnetic bunch compressor upstream of the FEL wiggler. This noninvasive diagnostic provides bunch length measurements for CW beam operation at any micropulse frequency. We also compare the measurements made with the ...

Transmission of Megawatt Relativistic Electron Beams through Millimeter Apertures

High-power, relativistic electron beams from energy-recovering linacs have great potential to realize new experimental paradigms for pioneering innovation in fundamental and applied research. A major design consideration for this new generation of experimental capabilities is the understanding of the halo associated with these bright, intense beams. In this Letter, we report on measurements performed using the 100 MeV, 430 kW cw electron beam from the energy-recovering linac at the Jefferson Laboratorys Free Electron Laser facility as it traversed a set of small apertures in a 127 mm long aluminum block. Thermal measurements of the block together with neutron measurements near the beam-target interaction point yielded a consistent understanding of the beam losses. These were determined to be 3 ppm through a 2 mm diameter aperture and were maintained during a 7 h continuous run.

Study of generic front-end designs for erl based light sources

We present work directed at examining the performance of various front end components of an ERL based light source. These include electron source, bunch compression, merger, and accelerating sections, with parameter space dictated by proposed facilities (at FSU and Peking University). These facilities share enough common structural features to make the study applicable to both to a large extent. In this report we will discuss the 6D phase space evolution through the front end based on simulation, with reliable modeling of magnetic and superconducting RF fields. Discussion will be devoted to relative merits of alternative designs, robustness and operational scenarios.

RMS emittance measurements using optical transition radiation interferometry at the Jefferson Lab FEL

Optical transition radiation interferometry (OTRI) has proven to be effective tool for measuring rms beam divergence. We present rms emittance measurement results of the 115 MeV energy recovery linac at the Thomas Jefferson National Laboratorys Free Electron Laser using OTRI. OTR data from both near field beam images and far field angular distribution images give evidence of two spatial and angular distributions within the beam. Using the unique features of OTRI we segregate the two distributions of the beam and estimate separate rms emittance values for each component.

Development of BPM Electronics at the JLAB FEL

A new version of BPM electronics based on the AD8362 RMS detector, which is a direct RF to DC converter, is under development at the JLAB FEL. Each of these new BPM electronics utilizes an embedded ColdFire Microprocessor for data processing and communication with the EPICS control system via TCP/IP. The ColdFire runs RTEMS, which is an open source real‐time operating system. The JLAB FEL is a SRF Energy Recovery LINAC capable of running up to 10 mA CW beam with a 74.85 MHz micropulse frequency. For diagnostic reasons and for machine tune up, the micropulse frequency can be reduced to 1.17 MHz, which corresponds to about 160 μA of beam current. It is required that the BPM system would be functional for all micropulse frequencies. By taking into account the headroom for the beam steering and current variations the dynamic range of the RF front end is required to be about 60 dB. A BPM resolution of at least 100 μm is required, whereas better resolution is very desirable to make it possible for more accurate...

Feasibility of near-field ODR imaging of multi-GeV electron beams at CEBAF

We have evaluated the feasibility of using the optical diffraction radiation (ODR) generated as a 1- to 6-GeV CW electron beam passes nearby the edge of a single metal conducting plane as a nonintercepting (NI) relative beam size monitor for CEBAF. Previous experiments were successfully done using near-field imaging on the lower-current, 7-GeV beam at APS, and an analytical model was developed for near-field imaging. Calculations from this model indicate sufficient beam size sensitivity in the ODR profiles for beam sizes in the 30- to 50- micron regime as found in the transport lines of CEBAF before the experimental targets. With anticipated beam currents of 100 muA, the ODR signal from the charge integrated over the video field time should be -500 times larger than in the APS case. These signal strengths will allow a series of experiments to be done on beam energy dependencies, impact parameters, polarization effects, and wavelength effects that should further elucidate the working regime of this technique and test the model. Plans for the diagnostics station that will provide reference optical transition radiation (OTR) images will also be described.