The influence of cooldown conditions at transition temperature on the quality factor of niobium sputtered quarter-wave resonators for HIE-ISOLDE

Superconducting quarter-wave resonators (QWRs) are to be used in the ongoing linac upgrade of the ISOLDE facility at CERN. The cavities are made of niobium sputtered on copper substrates. They will be operated at 101.28 MHz at 4.5 K providing 6 MV/m accelerating gradient with 10 W power dissipation. In recent measurements, we found the thermal gradient along the cavity during the niobium superconducting transition has an impact on the cavity quality factor. On the other hand, the speed of the cooling down through the superconducting transition turned out to have no influence on the cavity Q-factor.