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

New technology needs to be developed for future compact linear colliders. The AWA Facility is dedicated to the study of advanced accelerator concepts towards this goal. The facility uses high charge short electron bunches to drive wakefields in dielectric loaded structures as well as in metallic structures (iris loaded, photonic band gap, etc). Accelerating gradients as high as 100 MV/m have been reached in dielectric loaded structures, and RF pulses of up to 44 MW have been generated at 7.8 GHz. In order to reach higher accelerating gradients, and also be able to generate higher RF power levels, several facility upgrades are underway: a new RF gun with a higher QE photocathode; a witness beam to probe the wakefields; additional klystrons and linac structures to bring the beam energy up to 75 MeV. The drive beam will consist of bunch trains of up to 32 bunches of 60 nC, corresponding to a beam power of 6 GW. The goal of future experiments is to reach accelerating gradients of several hundred MV/m and to extract RF pulses with GW power level. A key advantage of wakefield acceleration in structures is the ability to act on electrons and positrons in basically identical fashion.