Simulations of the ILC Electron Gun and ElectronBunching System

Abstract

The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a proposed electron-positron collider, expected to provide insight into important questions in particle physics. A part of the global R&D effort for the ILC is the design of its electron gun and electron bunching system. The present design of the bunching system has two sub-harmonic bunchers, one operating at 108 MHz and one at 433MHz, and two 5-cell 1.3 GHz (L-band) bunchers. This bunching system has previously been simulated using the Phase and Radial Motion in Electron Linear Accelerators (PARMELA) software, and those simulations indicated that the design provides sufficient bunching and acceleration. Due to the complicated dynamics governing the electrons in the bunching system we decided to verify and expand the PARMELA results using the more recent and independent simulation software General Particle Tracer (GPT). GPT tracks the motion and interactions of a set of macro particles, each of which represent a number of electrons, and provides a variety of analysis capabilities. To provide initial conditions for the macro particles, a method was developed for deriving the initial conditions from detailed simulations of particle trajectories in the electron gun. These simulations were performed using the Egun software. For realistic simulation of the L-bandmore » bunching cavities, their electric and magnetic fields were calculated using the Superfish software and imported into GPT. The GPT simulations arrived at similar results to the PARMELA simulations for sub-harmonic bunching. However, using GPT it was impossible to achieve an efficient bunching performance of the first L-band bunching cavity. To correct this, the first L-band buncher cell was decoupled from the remaining 4 cells and driven as an independent cavity. Using this modification we attained results similar to the PARMELA simulations. Although the modified bunching system design performed as required, the modifications are technically challenging to implement. Further work is needed to optimize the L-Band buncher design.« less