Numerical studies and measurements on the side-coupled drift tube linac (SCDTL) accelerating structure

Abstract

The 3 GHz linac section designed for the low energy (7–65 MeV) part of TOP (therapy oncological protons) linac (Picardi et al., 1997, 1996), operating at 3 GHz frequency and in π/2 mode, consists of eight modules of the structure SCDTL (side-coupled drift tube linac). The first module is designed to accelerate 7 MeV protons up to 13.4 MeV, and a prototype is presently under construction. Electromagnetic field calculations of the non-axisymmetric cavities carried out by using MAFIA 3D code (Weiland, 1986) gave the RF wall losses and the full mode spectrum. Two prototypes, an aluminium model of the first quintuplet and a copper model of the last triplet of the module, were built in order to check the complex 3D properties of the structure, and to refine the tuning procedure. This paper reports the results of the 3D numerical simulations about the RF properties of the first module and of some RF measurements on the prototypes. The beam dynamics study results in the SCDTL section are discussed as well.