Abstract: This article presents the design, construction, and high-power test of two $X$ -band radio frequency (RF) accelerating structures built as part of a collaboration between CERN and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) for the compact linear collider (CLIC) study. The structures are a modified “tuning-free ” variant of an existing CERN design and were assembled using Swiss free electron laser (SwissFEL) production methods. The purpose of the study is two-fold. The first objective is to validate the RF properties and high-power performance of the tuning-free, vacuum brazed PSI technology. The second objective is to study the structures' high-gradient behavior to provide insight into the breakdown and conditioning phenomena as they apply to high-field devices in general. Low-power RF measurements showed that the structure field profiles were close to the design values, and both structures were conditioned to accelerating gradients in excess of 100 MV/m in CERN's high-gradient test facility. Measurements performed during the second structure test suggest that the breakdown rate (BDR) scales strongly with the accelerating gradient, with the best fit being a power law relation with an exponent of 31.14. In both cases, the test results indicate that stable, high-gradient operation is possible with tuning-free, vacuum brazed structures of this kind.

Abstract: The main aim of this work is to present a simple method, based on analytical expressions, for obtaining the temperature increase due to the Joule effect inside the metallic walls of an RF accelerating component. This technique relies on solving the 1-D heat-transfer equation for a thick wall, considering that the heat sources inside the wall are the ohmic losses produced by the RF electromagnetic fields penetrating the metal with finite electrical conductivity. Furthermore, it is discussed how the theoretical expressions of this method can be applied to obtain an approximation to the temperature increase in realistic 3-D RF accelerating structures, taking as an example the cavity of an RF electron photoinjector and a traveling wave linac cavity. These theoretical results have been benchmarked with numerical simulations carried out with commercial finite-element method (FEM) software, finding good agreement among them. Besides, the advantage of the analytical method with respect to the numerical simulations is evidenced. In particular, the model could be very useful during the design and optimization phase of RF accelerating structures, where many different combinations of parameters must be analyzed in order to obtain the proper working point of the device, allowing to save time and speed up the process. However, it must be mentioned that the method described in this article is intended to provide a quick approximation to the temperature increase in the device, which of course is not as accurate as the proper 3-D numerical simulations of the component.

Abstract: This paper presents the final design and results of the FADC Mezzanine for the EXOGAM (EXOtic GAMma array spectrometer) and NEDA (Neutron Detector Array) detectors. The measurements performed include those of studying the effective number of bits, the energy resolution using HP-Ge detectors, as well as timing histograms and discrimination performance. Finally, the conclusion shows how a common digitizing device has been integrated in the experimental environment of two very different detectors which combine both low-noise acquisition and fast sampling rates. Not only the integration fulfilled the expected specifications on both systems, but it also showed how a study of synergy between detectors could lead to the reduction of resources and time by applying a common strategy.