Numerical Calibration of the Bead-Pull Setup for Beam Coupling Impedance Evaluation

The bead-pull method is a commonly used electromagnetic field measurement technique exploited to tune a radiofrequency cavity to achieve design specifications. The frequency of a resonant cavity is perturbed by inserting a metallic or dielectric bead. For a given electromagnetic field, the amplitude of the perturbation depends only on the geometry of the perturbing object. Therefore, the calibration of the bead can be done in different resonant structures without loss of generality. In this paper, a method to perform an accurate calibration of the bead with electromagnetic simulations is proposed. Compared to the common practice of measuring a reference cavity, the flexibility given by the simulation method to study different bead shapes and sizes could be advantageous to optimize the measurement setup. A calibrated bead-pull setup allows to quantify the electric field and, therefore, the shunt impedance of the resonant modes of the cavity. As experimental benchmark, the beam coupling impedance measured with the calibrated bead-pull setup is compared with electromagnetic simulations.