Investigation of Voltage Breakdown Caused by Microparticles

Degradation of RF accelerating cavities caused by field emission currently limits the design of future linear accelerators. When field emission is the problem, foreign particles often deserve the blame, but they can be ”processed” away if the cavity electric field is high enough to initiate voltage breakdown near the particle site, in which case the troublesome particle vaporizes, leaving behind a crater surrounded by a starburst-shaped feature. Severe cratering, however, erodes cavity surfaces to the point of significantly diminished acceleration capability. Breakdown events producing craters and starbursts similar to those seen in RF cavities can also be incited by a DC electric field. After intentionally contaminating niobium and copper cathodes with different kinds of micron-sized particles, we used scanning electron microscopes with EDX and AES capabilities to obtain ”before” and ”after” pictures of particles that vaporized under DC electric fields between 30 and 150 MV/m.