High-Gradient Test of a Tungsten-Iris X-Band Accelerator Structure at NLCTA

The CLIC study group at CERN has built two X-band accelerating structures to be tested at SLAC in NLCTA. The structures consist of copper cells with insert irises made out of molybdenum and tungsten, clamped together and installed in a vacuum tank. These structures are exactly scaled versions from structures tested previously at 30 GHz and with short pulses (16 ns) in the CLIC Test Facility at CERN. At 30 GHz these structures reached gradients of 150 MV/m for tungsten and 195 MV/m for molybdenum. These experiments were designed to provide data on the dependence of rf breakdown on pulse length and frequency. This paper reports in particular on the high-gradient test of the tungsten-iris structure. At the shortest possible pulse length of 22 ns a gradient of 125 MV/m was reached at X-band, 20 % lower than the 150 MV/m measured at 30 GHz in the CLIC Test Facility. The pulse length dependence and the dependence of the break down rate as a function of gradient were measured in detail. The results are compared to data obtained from the molybdenum-iris experiment at X-band which took place earlier as well as to 30 GHz data.