Speaker
Description
Superconducting radiofrequency (SRF) accelerators are critical to scientific facilities across the world. These accelerators require large liquid helium cooling plants to maintain the extremely low temperatures necessary for their operation, resulting in high capital and operating expenses. Recently, researchers at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) and General Atomics (GA) demonstrated the SRF performance of a 952 MHz Nb3Sn/Nb, copper coated single-cell accelerating cavity using Sumitomo RDE-418D4 conduction cryocoolers. The cavity exhibited gradients up to 12.4 MV/m, equivalent to 1 MeV energy gain. The advent of the conduction-cooled cryomodule is a significant advancement for SRF accelerator systems that improves compactness and reduces cost. The TJNAF-GA collaboration is now focused on demonstrating the SRF performance of a cryomodule leveraging a multi-cell cavity that can achieve up to 10 MeV energy gain. This advancement will make environmental remediation and directed energy applications more feasible, such as waste processing and free electron laser systems, respectively. In parallel to the compact cryomodule development, TJNAF and GA are collaborating in the development of an efficient and scalable magnetron combination system. The coherent combination of compact and efficient magnetron technology can achieve powers on the order of megawatts at continuous-wave operation. Industrial applications of SRF accelerators, such as remediation of forever chemicals and bulk material processing, can achieve advanced efficiencies and decreased operating costs being driven by banks of magnetrons. The ongoing developments between GA and TJNAF and future directions will be discussed.
Development of a prototype superconducting radio-frequency cavity for conduction-cooled accelerators, G. Ciovati et al., Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams 26, 044701 (2023)
