Voltage-breakdown testing for an RFQ structure

Designs for Radio Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) accelerators of reasonable length require operation with surface fields above the threshold of Kilpatrick's Sparking Criterion. A cavity was designed using SUPERFISH to test the validity of this criterion and to determine operating limits for the Los Alamos Proof-of-Princple (POP) RFQ. The testing was done near 420 MHz, with varying qualities of surface finish on the electrodes. The experimental set-up and procedure are described, as are the data and results. A method of calibrating the test is presented

Radio frequency quadrupole accelerating structure research at Los Alamos

The results of studies of radio frequency quadrupole accelerating structures are presented. Measurements indicate that this is a promising structure for transporting and accelerating ion beams in the energy region of 50 KeV to 2 MeV

Three-Dimensional Simulations for Accelerator Physics Using ARGUS*

ARGUS is a three-dimensional, electromagnetic, particle-in-cell (PIG) simulation code that uses a modular code ar-chitecture to allow multiple physics modules to share common utilities for grid and structure setup, memory management, disk I/O, differential vector field operators, and diagnostics. The code includes modules for electro-static and electromagnetic field solutions, electromagnetic eigenvalue problems, and PIC simulation in either a steady-state or a time-dependent algorithm. SAIC and LANL (Accelerator Code Group) are collaborating to release ARGUS to the U.S. accelerator community. The code is available, with documentation, both at LANL and at NERSC (LLNL). Applications of ARGUS to waveguide and cavity problems and wake-field calculations are pre