The energy recovery linac test facility (ERL-TF), a compact ERL-FEL (free electron laser) two-purpose machine, was proposed at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing. As one important component of the TF, the photo-injector started with a photocathode direct-current gun has been designed. In this paper optimization of the injector beam dynamics in low-charge operation mode is performed with iterative scans using Impact-T. In addition, the dependencies between the optimized beam quality and the initial offset at cathode and element parameters are investigated. The tolerance of alignment and rotation errors is also analyzed. PACs: 29.20.Ej, 29.27.Bd, 41.85.Ja
IntroductionThe energy recovery linac (ERL) and free electron laser (FEL) are considered to be candidates of the fourth generation light sources, and have received much attention worldwide. Since both of them are based on linac technologies, it is possible to combine FEL into an ERL facility, resulting in a compact two-purpose light source. A test facility, named energy recovery linac test facility (ERL-TF), was proposed at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing, to verify this principle [1]. Physical design of the ERL-TF started a few years ago and is well in progress [2][3][4]. The layout and main parameters of the facility are presented in Fig. 1 and Table 1, respectively. Among the components of the facility, one extremely important device dominating the machine performance is the photo-injector. The injector, including a 500-kV photocathode direct-current (DC) gun equipped with a GaAs cathode, a 1.3 GHz normal conducting RF buncher, two solenoids, and two 2-cell superconducting RF cavities, was designed for the ERL-TF [2], with the layout shown in Fig. 2. With the initial parameters listed in Table 2, beam simulation of the designed injector was made for the high-charge operation mode (bunch charge 77 pC, rep. rate 130 MHz) with the ASTRA program [5], and finally an electron beam, with kinetic energy E k of 5 MeV, normalized emittance n,x(y) of 1.49 mm.mrad, rms bunch length z of 0.67 mm and rms energy spread of 0.72%, was achieved at the end of the injector. In this paper, we optimize the beam dynamics of low-charge operation mode (bunch charge 7.7 pC, rep. rate 1.3 GHz) with iterative scans using the Impact-T program [6]. Thanks to the relatively weak space charge force, an electron beam with n,x(y) of 0.4 mm.mrad, z of 0.74 mm and of 0.33% is obtained in the case of 0.5-mm incident laser rms transverse size. Moreover, the dependency of the beam quality on various variables, such as initial offset at cathode and element parameters, and the sensitivity of beam dynamics to element alignment and rotation errors are also investigated in this paper.