Development of photoinjector RF cavity for high-power CW FEL

An RF photoinjector capable of producing high continuous average current with low emittance and energy spread is a key enabling technology for high-power CW FEL. A preliminary design of the first, and the most challenging, section of a 700-MHz CW RF normal-conducting photoinjector—a 2.5-cell, pi-mode cavity with solenoidal magnetic field for emittance compensation—is completed. Beam dynamics simulations demonstrate that this cavity with an electric field gradient of 7 MV/m will produce an electron beam at 2.7 MeV with the transverse rms emittance 7 mm mrad at 3 nC of charge per bunch. Electromagnetic field computations combined with a thermal and stress analysis show that the challenging problem of cavity cooling can be successfully resolved. in the process of building a 100-mA (3 nC of bunch charge at 33.3 MHz bunch repetition rate) photoinjector for demonstration purposes. Its performance parameters will enable a robust 100-kW-class FEL operation with electron beam energy below 100 MeV. The design is scalable to higher power levels by increasing the electron bunch repetition rate and provides a path to a MW-class amplifier FEL.