Design and test of superconducting RF cavity prototypes for high intensity proton accelerators.

High intensity proton beams, in the multi-MW range (typically 1 GeV and a few mA) are considered today for different applications: neutron sources, nuclear waste transmutation, radioactive ion beams and neutrino factories. All the foreseen projects are based on superconducting RF cavities for the high energy part of the linac accelerator between 100 MeV and 1 GeV. In this paper we present conceptual and experimental work made by the French group in the R&D preliminary phase. The aim of this study was to design an optimized cavity prototype integrating the more recent progress on RF superconductivity in terms of fabrication and preparation techniques. To reach high accelerating gradients while keeping safety margins and good reliability imposes careful cavity geometry optimization and detailed study of some important technological issues. The most relevant results obtained with several cavity prototypes (accelerating gradient, multipactor, …) are presented. Some other important components of the cavity (helium tank and cold tuner) are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]