Metallurgical analysis and RF losses in superconducting niobium thin film cavities

Copper cavities with a thin niobium film as used in the large electron positron collider LEP would be also attractive for future linear colliders, provided the decrease of the Q-value with the accelerating gradient can be reduced. We aim at extracting the important parameters that govern this decrease. The dependence on the RF frequency is studied by exciting 500 MHz and 1500 MHz cavities in different modes. In addition we combined RF measurements for two 1500 MHz cavities of different RF performance with microscopic tests (AFM, TEM) on samples cut out of the same cavities. Their micro-structural characterisation in plan-view allows to extract the grain size and the defect densities

Secondary Beam Monitors for the NuMI Facility at FNAL

The Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) facility is a conventional neutrino beam which produces muon neutrinos by focusing a beam of mesons into a long evacuated decay volume. We have built four arrays of ionization chambers to monitor the position and intensity of the hadron and muon beams associated with neutrino production at locations downstream of the decay volume. This article describes the chambers' construction, calibration, and commissioning in the beam.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nucl. Instr. Meth.

The Superconducting TESLA Cavities

The conceptional design of the proposed linear electron-positron collider TESLA is based on 9-cell 1.3 GHz superconducting niobium cavities with an accelerating gradient of Eacc >= 25 MV/m at a quality factor Q0 > 5E+9. The design goal for the cavities of the TESLA Test Facility (TTF) linac was set to the more moderate value of Eacc >= 15 MV/m. In a first series of 27 industrially produced TTF cavities the average gradient at Q0 = 5E+9 was measured to be 20.1 +- 6.2 MV/m, excluding a few cavities suffering from serious fabrication or material defects. In the second production of 24 TTF cavities additional quality control measures were introduced, in particular an eddy-current scan to eliminate niobium sheets with foreign material inclusions and stringent prescriptions for carrying out the electron-beam welds. The average gradient of these cavities at Q0 = 5E+9 amounts to 25.0 +- 3.2 MV/m with the exception of one cavity suffering from a weld defect. Hence only a moderate improvement in production and preparation techniques will be needed to meet the ambitious TESLA goal with an adequate safety margin. In this paper we present a detailed description of the design, fabrication and preparation of the TESLA Test Facility cavities and their associated components and report on cavity performance in test cryostats and with electron beam in the TTF linac. The ongoing R&D towards higher gradients is briefly addressed.Comment: 45 pages (Latex), 39 figures (Encapsulated Postscript), 53 Author

Optical far-field microscopy of single molecules with 3.4 nm lateral resolution.

Optical far-field imaging of single molecules in a frozen solution at 1.2 K with a lateral resolution of 3.4 nm is reported. The mechanical stability of the fluorescence microscope, especially of the low-temperature insert, allows for the localization of fluorescing molecules with a reproducibility of better than 5 nm within observation times up to 10 min. For observation times of 9 h the reproducibility of the lateral position is limited to about 20 nm due to mechanical drift. Lateral position and orientation of 314 single molecules, present within the confocal detection volume of approximately 10 microm(3), are obtained. The possibility to correct for mechanical drift by monitoring the position of a spatial reference in the sample is demonstrated