• S.F. Mikhailov, J.Y. Li, V. Popov, P.W. Wallace, P. Wang, Y.K. Wu
  FEL/Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
• O. Anchugov
  BINP SB RAS, Novosibirsk

Funding: This work is supported by the US DoE grant #DE-FG02-01ER41175

A booster-injector synchrotron has been recently built and commissioned at Duke University to provide for the top-off injection into the storage ring in the energy range of 0.24 - 1.2 GeV. Booster injection kicker was designed with a pulse length of 18 out of 19 booster separatrixes, assuming a long train of electron bunches to be injected from the existing linac. Such scheme required a major linac upgrade from single bunch photo emission mode to a multibunch thermionic mode. A major disadvantage of the latter was much higher radiation levels in the facility. Since commissioning, the booster could only operate with one or two bunches limited by both long kicker pulse and single bunch injection from the linac. The consequent limitation of the injection rate restricted the capability of production of the Compton gamma rays in the loss mode, i.e. production of gammas with energy above 20-25 MeV, to about 5*10⁸ photons per sec. Update of the linac for the repetition rate of up to 10 Hz, and modification of the injection kicker for 15 nS pulse length allowed us to developed an alternative multibunch injection scheme with a significant increase of the injection rate into storage ring.

• V. Popov, S.F. Mikhailov, P.W. Wallace
  FEL/Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
• O. Anchugov, Yu. Matveev, D.A. Shvedov
  BINP SB RAS, Novosibirsk

Funding: Supported by US DoE grant #DE-FG02-01ER41175

The Duke FEL/HIGS (Free electron laser/High Intensity Gamma-ray source) facility has recently undergone through a series of major upgrade. As a part of this upgrade, a kicker system was designed to provide reliable injection from the booster into the storage ring at any energy chosen from the range of 240 MeV to 1.2 GeV. Relatively new and not sufficiently studied switching device has been selected as a basic component to build a set of nanosecond resolution high-voltage generators. So called Pseudo-Spark Switch (PSS), also known as a cold cathode thyratron, has the same or slightly better jitter, reasonable range of switched high voltages and significantly lower heater power as compared to the traditional “hot” thyratrons. Despite of the fact that it requires more complicated triggering system, this device still seems very attractive as a driver for short pulse kickers. Almost three years of operation of the Duke FEL facility has revealed number of advantages and challenges related to the thyratrons of this type. In this paper we depict design features of the kicker system, discuss some accomplished improvements and summarize our three year experience.