Slug tuner effect on the field stabilization of the drift tube linac

Abstract

In a drift tube linac (DTL), the accelerating field is stabilized against external perturbation, through resonant coupling between each cell by using post couplers. For proper field stabilization tuning, the frequency band between the post mode and the cavity mode should be closed. In addition, the field profile along the beam axis of the highest post mode should be similar to that of the TM011 cavity mode. As a conventional method to correct the resonance frequency and to make the accelerating field flat, slug tuners are incorporated. We observed that the similarity of field profiles between the highest post mode and the TM011 cavity mode disappeared when the slug tuners were inserted too much into the DTL tank. To achieve field stabilization tuning, we limited the slug tuner insertion and used a tuning ring around each post coupler to tune the resonant frequency of the DTL tank. The details of the effect of a slug tuner on the field stabilization tuning and the solution to the resonant frequency tuning problem caused by limited slug insertion will be presented in this paper.