Measurements of RF Breakdowns in Beam Driven mm-Wave Accelerating Structures

We studied the physics and properties of rf breakdowns in high gradient traveling-wave accelerating structures at 100 GHz. The structures are open, made of two halves with a gap in between. The rf fields were excited in the structure by an ultra-relativistic electron beam generated by the FACET facility at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. We observed rf breakdowns generated in the presence of GV/m scale electric fields. We varied the rf fields excited by the FACET bunch by moving structure relative to the beam and by changing the gap between structure halves. Reliable breakdowns detectors allowed us to measure the rf breakdown rate at these different rf parameters. We measured radiated rf energy with a pyro-detector. When the beam was off-axis, we observed beam deflection in the beam position monitors and on the screen of a magnetic spectrometer. The measurements of the deflection allowed us to verify our calculation of the accelerating gradient.
Proceedings of the 7th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2016, Busan, Korea