FIRST OPERATION OF A HYBRID E-GUN AT THE SCHLESINGER CENTER FOR COMPACT ACCELERATORS IN ARIEL UNIVERSITY

A novel hybrid photo injector was designed and partially tested at the UCLA Particle Beam Physics Laboratory. It was later commissioned at Ariel University in Israel as an on-going collaboration between the two universities. This unique, new generation design provides a radically simpler approach to RF feeding of a gun/buncher system, leading to a much shorter beam via velocity bunching owed to an attached traveling wave section of the photo-injector. This design results in better performance in beam parameters, pro- viding a high quality electron beam, with energy of 6 MeV, emittance of app 3 μm, and a 150 fs pulse duration at up to 1 nC per pulse. The unique e-gun will produce an electron pulse for a THz FEL, which will operate at the super-radiance regime, and therefore requires extraordinary beam proper- ties. This paper briefly describes the gun and presents initial operational results from the gun and its sub-systems.