Speaker
Description
High-gradient RF-photo-injectors offer outstanding electron-beam quality and properties, and are therefore utilized as drivers for X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), ultra-fast electron diffraction (UED), and other applications requiring short bunches with low emittance. DESY, with its sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen, has several decades of experience in developing and operating these particle sources. In particular, the free-electron lasers European XFEL and FLASH, as well as the small(er) scale facilities PITZ, ARES, and REGAE are driven by RF-photo-guns and rely on the unique beam parameters provided.
New manufacturing concepts based on additive manufacturing (AM) could offer ways to further improve the performance and expand the parameter space provided by these electron sources. For example, even higher gradients — and thus even smaller emittances — and an increase in repetition rate are highly desirable. However, both are challenging in terms of thermal load, which could be solved by AM approaches. At the same time, the cavity itself requires precise machining with tight tolerances and smooth surface quality to withstand the large fields and suppress dark current emission, which might be a challenge worth to address for the current state of the additive-manufacturing-art.