Investigation of an Ultrafast Harmonic Resonant RF Kicker
An Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) based multi-turn electron Circulator Cooler Ring (CCR) is envisaged in the proposed Jefferson Lab Electron Ion Collider (JLEIC) to cool the ion bunches with high energy (55 MeV), high current (1.5 A), high repetition frequency (476.3 MHz), high quality magnetized electron bunches. A critical component in this scheme is a pair of ultrafast kickers for the exchange of electron bunches between the ERL and the CCR. The ultrafast kicker should operate with the rise and fall time in less than 2.1 ns, at the repetition rate of ~10s MHz, and should be able to run continuously during the whole period of cooling. These -and-fall time being combined together, are well beyond the state-of-art of traditional pulsed power supplies and magnet kickers. To solve this technical challenge, an alternative method is to generate this high repetition rate, fast rise-and-fall time short pulse continuous waveform by summing several finite number of (co)sine waves at harmonic frequencies of the kicking repetition frequency, and these harmonic modes can be generated by the Quarter Wave Resonater (QWR) based multifrequency cavities. Assuming the recirculator factor is 10, 10 harmonic modes (from 47.63 MHz to 476.3 MHz) with proper amplitudes and phases, plus a DC offset are combined together, a continuous short pulse waveform with the rise-and-fall time in less than 2.1 ns, repetition rate of 47.63 MHz waveform can be generated. With the compact and matured technology of QWR cavities, the total cost of both hardware development and operation can be reduced to a modest level. Focuse on the technical scheme, three main topics will be discussed in this thesis: the synthetization of the kicking pulse, the design and optimization of the deflecting QWR multi-integer harmonic frequency resonator and the fabrication and bench measurements of a half scale copper prototype. In the kicking pulse synthetization part, we begin with the Fourier Series expansion of an ideal square pulse, and get a Flat-Top waveform which will give a uniform kick over the bunch length of the kicked electron bunches, thus the transverse emittance of these kicked electron bunches can be maintained. By using two identical kickers with the betatron phase advance of 180 degree or its odd multiples, the residual kick voltage wave slopes at the unkicked bunch position will be totally cancelled out. Flat-Top waveform combined with two kicker scheme, the transverse emittance of the cooling electron bunches will be conserved during the whole injection, recirculation, and ejection processes. In the cavity design part, firstly, the cavity geometry is optimized to get high transverse shunt impedance thus less than 100 W of RF losses on the cavity wall can be achieved for all these 10 harmonic modes. To support all these 10 harmonic modes, group of four QWRs are adopted with the mode distribution of 5:3:1:1. In the multi-frequency cavities such as the five-mode-cavity and the three-mode-cavity, tunings are required to achieve the design frequencies for each mode. Slight segments of taper design on the inner conductor help to get the frequencies to be exactly on the odd harmonic modes. Stub tuners equal to the number of resonant modes are inserted to the outer conductor wall to compensate the frequency shifts due manufacturing errors and other perturbations during the operation such as the change of the cavity temperature. Single loop couple is designed for all harmonic modes in each cavity. By adjusting its loop size, position and rotation, it is possible to get the fundamental mode critical coupled and other higher harmonic modes slightly over coupled. A broadband circulator will be considered for absorbing the reflected power. Finally in this part, multipole field components due to the asymmetric cylindrical structure around the beam axis of the cavity as well as the beam-induced higher order mode (HOM) issues will be analyzed and discussed in this thesis. A half-scale copper prototype cavity (resonant frequencies from 95.26 MHz to 857.34 MHz) was fabricated to validate the electromagnetic characteristics. With this half scale prototype, the tuning processes of multiple harmonic frequencies, unloaded quality factor measurements of each mode, and bead-pull measurements are performed. The bench measurement results matched well with the simulation results, which have validated our cavity design and construction methods. Finally, a simple mode combining experiment with five separate signal generators was performed on this prototype cavity and the desired fast rise/fall time (1.2 ns), high repetition rate (95.26 MHz) waveform was captured, which finally proved our design of this ultrafast harmonic kicker.