• M.E. Conde, S.P. Antipov, W. Gai, R. Konecny, W. Liu, J.G. Power, Z.M. Yusof
  ANL, Argonne
• C.-J. Jing
  Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio

The AWA Facility is dedicated to the study of advanced accelerator concepts based on electron beam driven wakefields. The facility employs an L-band photocathode RF gun to generate high charge short electron bunches, which are used to drive wakefields in dielectric loaded structures, as well as in metallic structures. Accelerating gradients as high as 100 MV/m have been reached in dielectric structures, and RF pulses of up to 44 MW have been generated at 7.8 GHz. In order to reach higher accelerating gradients and higher RF power levels, several upgrades are underway: (a) a new RF gun with higher QE photocathode will replace the present drive gun; (b) the existing RF gun will generate a witness beam to probe the wakefields; (c) three new 25 MW L-band RF power stations will be added to the facility; (d) five additional linac structures will bring the beam energy up from 15 MeV to 75 MeV. The drive beam will consist of bunch trains of up to 32 bunches, with up to 60 nC per bunch. The goal of future experiments is to reach accelerating gradients of several hundred MV/m and to extract RF pulses with GW power level.

• C.-J. Jing
  Euclid TechLabs, LLC, Solon, Ohio
• S.P. Antipov, M.E. Conde, W. Gai, F. Gao, J.G. Power, Z.M. Yusof
  ANL, Argonne
• H. Chen, C.-X. Tang, S.X. Zheng
  TUB, Beijing
• P. Xu
  Tsinghua University, Beijing

Wakefield excitation has been experimentally studied in a 3-cell X-band standing wave Photonic Band Gap (PBG) accelerating structure. Major monopole (TM01- and TM02-like) and dipole (TM11- and TM12-like) modes were indentified and characterized by precisely controlling the position of beam injection. The quality factor Q of the dipole modes was measured to be ~10 times smaller than that of the accelerating mode. A charge sweep, up to 80 nC, has been performed, equivalent to ~30 MV/m accelerating field on axis. A variable delay low charge witness bunch following a high charge drive bunch was used to calibrate the gradient in the PBG structure by measuring its maximum energy gain and loss. Experimental results agree well with numerical simulations.