In this paper, we study the effect of the actual, locally resolved, field emission area on electron emission characteristics of uniform planar conductive nitrogen-incorporated ultrananocrystalline diamond ((N)UNCD) field emitters. High resolution imaging experiments were carried out in a field emission microscope with a specialty imaging anode screen such that electron emission micrographs were taken concurrently with measurements of I-V characteristics. An automated image processing algorithm was applied to process the extensive imaging data sets and calculate the emission area per image. It was routinely found that field emission from as-grown planar (N)UNCD films was always confined to a counted number of discrete emitting centers across the surface, which varied in size and electron emissivity. It was established that the actual field emission area critically depends on the applied electric field and that the field emission area and overall electron emissivity improve with the sp-fraction present in the film, irrespective of the original substrate roughness or morphology. Most importantly, when as-measured I-E characteristics were normalized by the electric field-dependent emission area, the resulting j-E curves demonstrated a strong kink and departed from the Fowler-Nordheim law, finally saturating at a value on the order of 100 mA/cm. This value was nearly identical for all studied films regardless of substrate. It was concluded that the saturation value is specific to the intrinsic fundamental properties of (N)UNCD.

A tunable energy-chirp compensator was used to remove a correlated energy chirp from the 60-MeV beam at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Accelerator Test Facility. The compensator operates through the interaction of the wakefield of the electron bunch with itself and consists of a planar structure comprised of two alumina bars with copper-plated backs separated by an adjustable beam aperture. By changing the gap size, the correlated energy chirp of the electron bunch was completely removed. Calculations show that this device, properly scaled to account for the electron bunch charge and length, can be used to remove residual correlated energy spread at the end of the linacs used for free-electron lasers. The experimental results are shown to be in good agreement with numerical simulations. Application of this technique can significantly simplify linac design and improve free-electron lasers performance.

In recent years new interest in Cherenkov radiation has arisen based on progress in its new applications like biomedical imaging, photonic structures, metamaterials, and beam physics. These new applications require Cherenkov radiation theory of short bunches to be extended to rather more complicated media and structures than considered originally. We present a new general approach to the analysis of Cherenkov fields and loss factors for relativistic short bunches in arbitrary slow wave guiding systems. This new formalism is obtained by considering a general integral relation that allows calculation of the fields in the vicinity of the charge. The proposed approach dramatically simplifies simulations using analytical fields near the moving source of Cherenkov radiation.

Cherenkov radiation generated by a relativistic electron bunch in a rectangular dielectric-loaded waveguide is analyzed under the assumption that the dielectric layers are inhomogeneous normal to the beam path. We propose a method that uses eigenfunctions of the transverse operator applied to develop a rigorous full solution for the wakefields that are generated. The dispersion equation for the structure is derived and the wakefield analysis is carried out. The formalism developed here allows the direct solution of the inhomogeneous system of Maxwell equations, an alternative analytic approach to the analysis of wakefields in contrast to the previously used impedance method for rectangular structure analysis. The formalism described here was successfully applied to the analysis of rectangular dielectric-lined structures that have been recently beam tested at the Argonne (ANL/AWA) and Brookhaven (BNL/ATF) accelerator facilities.

Collinear wakefield acceleration has been long established as a method capable of generating ultrahigh acceleration gradients. Because of the success on this front, recently, more efforts have shifted towards developing methods to raise the transformer ratio (TR). This figure of merit is defined as the ratio of the peak acceleration field behind the drive bunch to the peak deceleration field inside the drive bunch. TR is always less than 2 for temporally symmetric drive bunch distributions and therefore recent efforts have focused on generating asymmetric distributions to overcome this limitation. In this Letter, we report on using the emittance-exchange method to generate a shaped drive bunch to experimentally demonstrate a TR≈5 in a dielectric wakefield accelerator.

We analyze radiation produced by an ultrarelativistic charge as it exits the open end of a cylindrical waveguide with a dielectric lining. The end of the waveguide can be either orthogonal to the structure axis or skewed. To obtain terahertz radiation from waveguides with centimeter or millimeter radii, we consider high order TM(0m) modes driven by the beam. We obtain an integral representation which describes the radiation produced by a single waveguide mode in the Fraunhofer zone. We perform a series of numerical calculations for structures which look promising for generation of THz radiation. It is shown that for a mode with large mode number, the aperture of the vacuum channel gives the main contribution to the field if the skew angle of the waveguide aperture is not too small. Simple expressions for the angle of the main pattern lobe maximum are obtained.

A new method for calculating the Cherenkov wakefield acting on a point charged particle passing through a longitudinally homogeneous structure lined with layer(s) of an arbitrary retarding (dielectric, resistive, or corrugated) material has been developed. In this paper we present a rigorous derivation of the expressions for the fields that are valid at the cross section of the particle on the basis of a conformal mapping method. This new formalism allows reduction of the loss factor calculation to a simple derivation of a conformal mapping function from the arbitrary cross section onto a circular disc. We generalize these results to the case of a bunch with an arbitrary transverse distribution by deriving a two-dimensional Green function at the cross section of the particle. Consequently, for the first time analytical expressions for the transverse distributions of the electric field E z for the most commonly used cylindrical, planar and elliptical cross section geometries are found. The proposed approach significantly decreases simulation time and opens new possibilities in optimizing wakefield effects resulting from short charged particle bunches for FEL and Linear Collider applications.

The beam breakup instability of the drive bunch in the structure-based collinear wakefield accelerator is considered and a stabilizing method is proposed. The method includes using the specially designed beam focusing channel, applying the energy chirp along the electron bunch, and keeping energy chirp constant during the drive bunch deceleration. A stability condition is derived that defines the limit on the accelerating field for the witness bunch.