High Field Studies for CLIC Accelerating Structures Development

Compact Linear Collider RF structures need to be able to achieve the very high average accelerating gradient of 100 MV/m. One of the main challenges in reaching such high accelerating gradients is to avoid vacuum electrical breakdown within CLIC accelerating structures. Accelerating structure tests are carried out in the klystron-based test stands known as the XBoxes. In order to investigate vacuum breakdown phenomena and its statistical characteristics in a simpler system and get results in a faster way, pulsed dc systems have been developed at CERN. To acquire sufficient breakdown data in a reasonable period of time, high repetition rate pulse generators are used in the systems for breakdown studies, so-called pulsed dc system. This paper describes the pulsed dc systems and the two high repetition rate circuits, which produce high-voltage pulses for it, available at CERN.