CW Room Temperature Accelerating Structures

To this day CW linear electron accelerators were based only on expensive and bulky (embedded in a cryostat) superconducting accelerating structures. CW regime can in principle be realized with normal conducting structures provided the shunt impedance is high. Such structures can be designed using dielectrics (ultra-pure ceramics in C-band and diamond in mm-waves) with ultra-low loss tangent (~10-6). The use of dielectrics allows to concentrate the electromagnetic energy density in the dielectric region and thus minimize fields and ohmic loss on metallic walls. The thermal loss in dielectric can be relatively low given the loss tangent is small. We report here the design of structures with shunt impedance on the order of 10⁴ MOhm/m, which is several orders of magnitude higher than shut impedance in copper structures in GHz and THz range. High shunt impedance makes it possible to accelerate electrons to 1 MeV using kW-level CW RF sources like magnetrons in C-band and gyrotrons in THz range. Such CW accelerators will find applications in sterilization, food irradiation, industrial radiography and cargo inspection.