LEETCHI: The high current electron source for the CLIC drive beam injector

LEETCHI is a source which will produce 140 keV, 5 A, 140 μs electron beams at a repetition rate of 50 Hz. The shot to shot and flat top current stability of this drive beam injector for CLIC has to be better than 0.1% and a geometrical emittance of 14 mm mrad is expected. The development of a high voltage modulator, to achieve those requirements, is ongoing. A small test stand has been built which allows to diagnose and dump the beam produced by the thermionic cathode. The thermionic cathode is equipped with a grid which will allow us to control the current and eventually to have a feedback on the flattop shape. The beam dump, made of graphite, has been designed using two different codes, the Monte Carlo code GEANT4 to simulate the energy deposition and ANSYS used to simulate the thermal resistance of the graphite due to the long pulse duration. The geometry has been optimized with the ray tracing code EGUN and the 2D PIC-code MAGIC. All these simulations allowed us to optimize the geometry of the gun and to develop diagnostics which must survive to the heat deposition. Finally, the first electrical measurements of the beam will be presented.