Speaker
Description
A compact continuous-wave (CW) 1.3 GHz linear accelerator (linac) is being developed as the core component of a pulsed positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) setup. Since conventional manufacturing limits the thermal management required for CW operation of radio-frequency (RF) cavities, pure-copper laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB/Cu) is used to fabricate monolithic cavities with integrated conformal cooling channels. While PBF-LB/Cu RF structures have shown promising low-power performance, their behavior under high-gradient operation remains largely unexplored. We present an additively manufactured 1.3 GHz single-cell cavity designed for high-gradient tests at the Mainz Energy-Recovering Superconducting Accelerator (MESA) RF system at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). The cavity was optimized with numerical tools such as CST Studio Suite with respect to its RF, thermal and mechanical characteristics. In addition, a detection and analysis framework for monitoring RF breakdown and cavity behavior under high power is presented.