Intense pulsed active detection (IPAD) is a promising technique for detecting fissile material to prevent the proliferation of special nuclear materials. With IPAD, fissions are induced in a brief, intense radiation burst and the resulting gamma ray or neutron signals are acquired during a short period of elevated signal-to-noise ratio. The 8 MV, 200 kA Mercury pulsed-power generator at the Naval Research Laboratory coupled to a high-power vacuum diode produces an intense 30 ns bremsstrahlung beam to study this approach. The work presented here reports on Mercury experiments designed to maximize the photofission yield in a depleted-uranium (DU) object in the bremsstrahlung far field by varying the anode-cathode (AK) diode gap spacing and by adding an inner-diameter-reducing insert in the outer conductor wall. An extensive suite of diagnostics was fielded to measure the bremsstrahlung beam and DU fission yield as functions of diode geometry. Delayed fission neutrons from the DU proved to be a valuable diagnostic for measuring bremsstrahlung photons above 5 MeV. The measurements are in broad agreement with particle-in-cell and Monte Carlo simulations of electron dynamics and radiation transport. These show that with increasing AK gap, electron losses to the insert and outer conductor wall increase and that the electron angles impacting the bremsstrahlung converter approach normal incidence. The diode conditions for maximum fission yield occur when the gap is large enough to produce electron angles close to normal, yet small enough to limit electron losses.

Ionization injection triggered by short wavelength laser pulses inside a nonlinear wakefield driven by a longer wavelength laser is examined via multidimensional particle-in-cell simulations. We find that very bright electron beams can be generated through this two-color scheme in either collinear propagating or transverse colliding geometry. For a fixed laser intensity $I$, lasers with longer/shorter wavelength $\lambda$ have larger/smaller ponderomotive potential ($\propto I{\lambda }^2$). The two-color scheme utilizes this property to separate the injection process from the wakefield excitation process. Very strong wakes can be generated at relatively low laser intensities by using a longer wavelength laser driver (e.g., a $10\mu \mathrm{m}$ ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ laser) due to its very large ponderomotive potential. On the other hand, a short wavelength laser can produce electrons with very small residual momenta ($p_{\perp }\sim a_0\sim \sqrt{I}\lambda$) inside the wake, leading to electron beams with very small normalized emittances (tens of nm). Using particle-in-cell simulations we show that a $\sim 10\mathrm{fs}$ electron beam with $\sim 4\mathrm{pC}$ of charge and a normalized emittance of $\sim 50\mathrm{nm}$ can be generated by combining a $10\mu \mathrm{m}$ driving laser with a 400 nm injection laser, which is an improvement of more than 1 order of magnitude compared to the typical results obtained when a single wavelength laser is used for both the wake formation and ionization injection. With the transverse colliding geometry, simulations show that similarly low emittance and much lower slice energy spread ($\sim 30\mathrm{keV}$, comparing with the typical value of few MeV in the longitudinal injection scheme) can be simultaneously obtained for electron beams with a few pC charge. Such low slice energy spread may have significant advantages in applications relevant to future coherent light sources driven by plasma accelerators.

As part of the CesrTA program at Cornell, diagnostic devices to measure and quantify the electron cloud effect have been installed throughout the CESR ring. One such device is the retarding field analyzer, which provides information on the local electron cloud density and energy distribution. In a magnetic field free environment, retarding field analyzer measurements can be directly compared with simulation to study the growth and dynamics of the cloud on a quantitative level. In particular, the photoemission and secondary emission characteristics of the instrumented chambers can be determined simultaneously.

The dynamics of electron acceleration driven by laser wakefield inside a 30.5 mm long dielectric capillary tube is analyzed using radiation emitted in the x-ray range. 3D particle-in-cell simulations, performed with parameters close to the experimental ones, show that in long plasmas, the accelerated electrons catch up and finally overrun the driving laser owing to a higher velocity of the electrons in the plasma. The electrons are then transversely scattered by the laser pulse, and penetrate the capillary wall where they generate bremsstrahlung radiation, modeled using geant4 simulations. The signature of bremsstrahlung radiation is detected using an x-ray camera, together with the betatron radiation emitted during electron acceleration in the plasma bubble. The reflection of betatron radiation from the inner capillary surface also accounts for a fraction of the observed signal on the x-ray camera. The simulation results are in agreement with the experimental ones and provide a detailed description of the electron and radiation properties, useful for the design of laser wakefield accelerators or radiation sources using long plasma media.

In high chromaticity circular accelerators, rapid decoherence of the betatron motion of a particle beam can make the measurement of lattice and bunch values, such as Courant-Snyder parameters and betatron amplitude, difficult. A method for reconstructing the momentum distribution of a beam from beam position measurements is presented. Further analysis of the same beam position monitor data allows estimates to be made of the Courant-Snyder parameters and the amplitude of coherent betatron oscillation of the beam. The methods are tested through application to data taken on the linear nonscaling fixed field alternating gradient accelerator, EMMA.

A major challenge in the design of rf cavities for the acceleration of medium-energy charged ions is the need to rapidly sweep the radio frequency over a large range. From low-power medical synchrotrons to high-power accelerator driven subcritical reactor systems, and from fixed focus alternating gradient accelerators to rapid cycling synchrotrons, there is a strong need for more efficient, and faster, acceleration of protons and light ions in the semirelativistic range of hundreds of MeV/u. A conventional way to achieve a large, rapid frequency sweep (perhaps over a range of a factor of 6) is to use custom-designed ferrite-loaded cavities. Ferrite rings enable the precise tuning of the resonant frequency of a cavity, through the control of the incremental permeability that is possible by introducing a pseudoconstant azimuthal magnetic field. However, rapid changes over large permeability ranges incur anomalous behavior such as the “Q-loss” and “f-dot” loss phenomena that limit performance while requiring high bias currents. Notwithstanding the incomplete understanding of these phenomena, they can be ameliorated by introducing a “harmonic ratcheting” acceleration scheme in which two or more rf cavities take turns accelerating the beam—one turns on when the other turns off, at different harmonics—so that the radio frequency can be constrained to remain in a smaller range. Harmonic ratcheting also has straightforward performance advantages, depending on the particular parameter set at hand. In some typical cases it is possible to halve the length of the cavities, or to double the effective gap voltage, or to double the repetition rate. This paper discusses and quantifies the advantages of harmonic ratcheting in general. Simulation results for the particular case of a rapid cycling medical synchrotron ratcheting from harmonic number 9 to 2 show that stability and performance criteria are met even when realistic engineering details are taken into consideration.

The dynamics of charged particles in general linear focusing lattices with quadrupole, skew-quadrupole, dipole, and solenoidal components, as well as torsion of the fiducial orbit and variation of beam energy is parametrized using a generalized Courant-Snyder (CS) theory, which extends the original CS theory for one degree of freedom to higher dimensions. The envelope function is generalized into an envelope matrix, and the phase advance is generalized into a 4D symplectic rotation, or a $U(2)$ element. The 1D envelope equation, also known as the Ermakov-Milne-Pinney equation in quantum mechanics, is generalized to an envelope matrix equation in higher dimensions. Other components of the original CS theory, such as the transfer matrix, Twiss functions, and CS invariant (also known as the Lewis invariant) all have their counterparts, with remarkably similar expressions, in the generalized theory. The gauge group structure of the generalized theory is analyzed. By fixing the gauge freedom with a desired symmetry, the generalized CS parametrization assumes the form of the modified Iwasawa decomposition, whose importance in phase space optics and phase space quantum mechanics has been recently realized. This gauge fixing also symmetrizes the generalized envelope equation and expresses the theory using only the generalized Twiss function $\beta$. The generalized phase advance completely determines the spectral and structural stability properties of a general focusing lattice. For structural stability, the generalized CS theory enables application of the Krein-Moser theory to greatly simplify the stability analysis. The generalized CS theory provides an effective tool to study coupled dynamics and to discover more optimized lattice designs in the larger parameter space of general focusing lattices.

In this paper we propose a scheme that allows a strong reduction of the timing jitter between the pulses of a free electron laser (FEL) and external laser pulses delivered simultaneously at the FEL experimental stations for pump-probe–type experiments. The technique, applicable to all seeding-based FEL schemes, relies on the free-space optical transport of a portion of the seed laser pulse from its optical table to the experimental stations. The results presented here demonstrate that a carefully designed laser beam transport, incorporating also a transverse beam position stabilization, allows one to keep the timing fluctuations, added by as much as 150 m of free space propagation and a number of beam folding mirrors, to less than 4 femtoseconds rms. By its nature our scheme removes the major common timing jitter sources, so the overall jitter in pump-probe measurements done in this way will be below 10 fs (with a margin to be lowered to below 5 fs), much better than the best results reported previously in the literature amounting to 33 fs rms.

We discuss beam deceleration through a series of 12 power extraction and transfer structures, at the CLIC test facility 3 at CERN, as a proof-of-principle of the CLIC deceleration scheme. Up to 36% of the kinetic energy of an electron drive beam is extracted and converted to 12 GHz rf power. We look at the average and maximum energy loss of the particles, and compare them with simulations performed with the placet tracking code. The measured final energy is also compared to predictions based on the measured beam current and rf power in the structures. In the analysis we make use of the charge distribution form factor, taking into account the bunch length and the bunch phase. Finally, we look at the evolution of the transverse emittance with deceleration and compare the measured emittance with simulations.

Reliable predictions of yields of nuclear fragments produced in electromagnetic dissociation and hadronic fragmentation of ion beams are of great practical importance in analyzing beam losses and interactions with the beam environment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN as well as for estimating radiation effects of galactic cosmic rays on the spacecraft crew and electronic equipment. The model for predicting the fragmentation of relativistic heavy ions is briefly described, and then applied to problems of relevance for LHC. The results are based on the fluka code, which includes electromagnetic dissociation physics and dpmjet-iii as hadronic event generator. We consider the interaction of fully stripped lead ions with nuclei in the energy range from about one hundred MeV to ultrarelativistic energies. The yields of fragments close in the mass and charge to initial ions are calculated. The approach under discussion provides a good overall description of Pb fragmentation data at 30 and $158A\mathrm{GeV}$ as well as recent LHC data for $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}=2.76\mathrm{TeV}$ Pb-Pb interactions. Good agreement with the calculations in the framework of different models is found. This justifies application of the developed simulation technique both at the LHC injection energy of $177A\mathrm{GeV}$ and at its collision energies of 1.38, 1.58, and $2.75A\mathrm{TeV}$, and gives confidence in the results obtained.

In this paper, the linear and second order optics corrections for the KEK Accelerator Test Facility (ATF2) final focus beam line are described. The beam optics of the ATF2 beam line is designed based on a local chromaticity correction scheme similar to the ILC final focus system. Beam measurements in 2012 revealed skew sextupole field errors that were much larger than expected from magnetic field measurements. The skew sextupole field error was a critical limitation of the beam size at the ATF2 virtual interaction point (IP). Therefore, four skew sextupole magnets were installed to correct the field error in August 2012. By using the four skew sextupole magnets, the predicted tolerances of the skew sextupole field errors of the ATF2 magnets were increased. Furthermore, analyzing field maps of the sextupole magnets identified the source of the skew sextupole field error. After the field error source was removed, the IP vertical beam size could more easily be focused to less than 65 nm.

We present a new design for a rf electron gun to be used in ultrashort ($\sim 1\mathrm{ps}$) electron bunch generation. Using both simulation and measurement we evaluated the principle of this new type rf gun and were able to confirm an ultrashort bunch generation. During simulation, a bunch length of less than 100 fs(rms) with a $100\mathrm{pC}/\text{bunch}$ charge was confirmed at the optimum operating condition. The principle is to produce a linearly distributed longitudinal phase space by using an attached output cell specially designed for energy chirping. Such phase space distribution can be rotated by the velocity difference in the bunch. We already fabricated an energy chirping cell attached rf gun and successfully observed 0.2 THz coherent synchrotron radiation, which corresponds to less than 500 fs bunch. Such an electron gun can be used as a compact THz light source and a new electron injector with an ultrashort bunch.

Recently, our group has demonstrated dielectric laser acceleration of nonrelativistic electrons at a scalable fused silica grating [J. Breuer and P. Hommelhoff, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 134803 (2013)]. This represents a demonstration of the inverse Smith-Purcell effect in the optical regime. The third spatial harmonic of the grating, which is excited by Titanium:sapphire laser pulses, synchronously accelerates 28 keV electrons derived from an electron microscope column. We observe a maximum acceleration gradient of $25\hspace{0.17em}\text{MeV}/\text{m}$. Here we present the experimental setup in detail. We describe grating-related issues such as surface charging and alignment as well as damage threshold measurements. A detailed explanation of the detection scheme is given. Furthermore, extensive numerical simulations are discussed, which agree well with the experimental results.

We present a new diagnostic method allowing one to reconstruct certain properties of a relativistic electron beam and of a laser pulse by looking at the result of their interaction. The latter takes place within an undulator and results in energy modulation of electrons. By taking advantage of the correlation between time and electron-beam energy, measurements of the electron-beam length, current and energy spread are possible simultaneously. Moreover, the scheme allows an accurate measurement of the timing jitter between the electron beam and the external laser and also of the laser’s actual pulse length at the interaction point. Experimental demonstration of the last two measurements is reported in this paper. Finally, this diagnostic method provides an independent measure of the energy transferred from the electron beam to free-electron laser light produced when seeded electrons are injected into a long undulator. Experimental results obtained at the FERMI free-electron laser are presented after a description of the proposed technique.

We propose using a radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) to introduce both the longitudinal spread of betatron frequency and the transverse spread of synchrotron frequency for Landau damping of transverse beam instabilities in accelerators. The existing theory of stability diagrams for Landau damping is applied to the case of a RFQ. As an example, the required quadrupolar strength is calculated for stabilizing the Large Hadron Collider beams at 7 TeV. It is shown that this strength can be provided by a superconducting rf device only a few meters long.

We have investigated the coating of an inner surface of superconducting radio frequency cavities with a magnesium diboride thin film by hybrid physical-chemical vapor deposition (HPCVD). To simulate a 6 GHz rf cavity, a straight stainless steel tube of 1.5-inch inner diameter and a dummy stainless steel cavity were employed, on which small sapphire and metal substrates were mounted at different locations. The ${\mathrm{MgB}}_2$ films on these substrates showed uniformly good superconducting properties including $T_c$ of 37–40 K, residual resistivity ratio of up to 14, and root-mean-square roughness $R_q$ of 20–30 nm. This work demonstrates the feasibility of coating the interior of cylindrical and curved objects with ${\mathrm{MgB}}_2$ by the HPCVD technique, an important step towards superconducting rf cavities with ${\mathrm{MgB}}_2$ coating.