Low-Field Accelerator Structure Couplers and Design Techniques

Recent experience with X-band accelerator structure development has shown the rf input coupler to be the region most prone to rf breakdown and degradation, effectively limiting the operating gradient. A major factor in this appears to be high magnetic fields at the sharp edges of the coupling irises. As a first response to this problem, couplers with rounded and thickened iris horns have been employed and successfully tested at high power. To further reduce fields for higher power flow, conceptually new coupler designs have been developed, in which power is coupled through the broadwall of the feed waveguide, rather than through terminating irises. A "mode launcher" coupler, which launches the TM01 mode in circular waveguide before coupling through a matching cell into the main structure, has been tested with great success. With peak surface fields below those in the body of the structure, this coupler represented a break-through in the NLC structure program. The design of this coupler and of variations which use beamline space more efficiently are described here. The latter include a coupler in which power passes directly through an iris in the broad wall of the rectangular waveguide into a matching cell, also successfully implemented, and a variation which makes the waveguide itself an accelerating cell. We also discuss in some detail a couple of techniques for matching such couplers to travelling-wave structures using a field solver. The first exploits the cell number independence of a travelling-wave match, and the second optimizes using the fields of an internally driven structure.