First demonstration of a cryocooler conduction cooled superconducting radiofrequency cavity operating at practical cw accelerating gradients
Abstract
We demonstrate practical accelerating gradients on a superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) accelerator cavity with cryocooler conduction cooling, a cooling technique that does not involve the complexities of the conventional liquid helium bath. A design is first presented that enables conduction cooling an elliptical-cell SRF cavity. Implementing this design, a single cell 650 MHz Nb3Sn cavity coupled using high purity aluminum thermal links to a 4 K pulse tube cryocooler generated accelerating gradients up to 6.6 MV/m at 100% duty cycle. The experiments were carried out with the cavity-cryocooler assembly in a simple vacuum vessel, completely free of circulating liquid cryogens. We anticipate that this cryocooling technique will make the SRF technology accessible to interested accelerator researchers who lack access to full-stack helium cryogenic systems. Furthermore, the technique can lead to SRF based compact sources of high average power electron beams for environmental protection and industrial applications. A concept of such an SRF compact accelerator is presented.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2001.07821,
title = {First demonstration of a cryocooler conduction cooled superconducting radiofrequency cavity operating at practical cw accelerating gradients},
author = {R. C. Dhuley and S. Posen and M. I. Geelhoed and O. Prokofiev and J. C. T. Thangaraj},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.07821},
year = {2020}
}