High Power Conditioning of the 202 MHz IH Tank 2 at the CERN LINAC3

High accelerating gradients are very interesting for future machines, and, in particular, for high-current heavy-ion linac projects like the "Inertial Fusion Driver". In order to explore the maximum field achievable in an Interdigital-H type structure (IH), an experiment has been carried out at CERN with the Lead Ion Linac (Linac3). After the 1997 run, the RF amplifiers were rearranged in order to allow the feeding of the IH Tank number 2 (1.54 m long, 28 gaps, frequency of 202.56 MHz) with up to 2 MW pulsed RF power. After two weeks of conditioning at pulse lengths varying between 200 ms and 1 ms with a constant pulse repetition rate of 0.8 Hz, the maximum effective accelerating gradient achieved was 10.7 MV/m. This corresponds to a local field maximum of 75 MV/m, and to fields in excess of 50 MV/m (3.5 times the Kilpatrick limit) on large portions of the drift tube surfaces. This paper reports the conditioning procedure used, the measurements of field emission current at different voltages and pulse lengths, the determination of the surface field enhancement factor as well as the calculation of the electric field distribution for the gap with the highest surface fields.