Speaker
Description
CERN's Linear Accelerator 4 (Linac4) is an H⁻ accelerator that has been in operation since 2020. After acceleration, the ions are converted to protons via electron stripping and sent downstream to various experiments on the CERN site. Its first accelerating structure is a 3 m long Radio-Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ), operating at 78 kV inter-vane voltage and a peak surface field of 34 MV/m. In 2025, a dedicated campaign was conducted to condition and test the recently constructed spare RFQ, providing the opportunity to study vacuum breakdown behavior in this complex structure.
This work presents high-power RF conditioning results to improve the understanding of breakdown limitations in the new RFQ. It also focuses on localizing breakdown events using signals from 16 pick-ups distributed along the cavity. These measurements are compared with RF simulations to correlate signal patterns with breakdown locations and provide insight into the underlying physical mechanisms.
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