Development of a Compact Dielectric-Loaded Test Accelerator at 11.4 GHz

This paper presents a progress report on the development of a dielectric-loaded test accelerator in the Magnicon Facility at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The accelerator will be powered by an 11.4-GHz magnicon amplifier that provides up to 25 MW of output power in a similar to 250-ns pulse at up to 10 Hz. The accelerator includes a 5-MeV electron injector originally developed at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and can incorporate dielectric-loaded accelerating (DLA) structures of up to 0.5 m in length. The DLA structures are being developed by Argonne National Laboratory and Euclid Techlabs, and shorter test structures fabricated from a variety of dielectric materials have undergone rf testing at NRL at accelerating gradients up to 15 MV/m. The first stage of the accelerator, including the 5-MeV injector, has recently begun operation, and initial operation of the complete dielectric-loaded test accelerator, including injector, DLA test structure, and spectrometer, should take place within the next year.