High gradient dielectric wakefield device measurements at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator

The Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) is a facility designed to investigate high gradient wakefield acceleration techniques. Wakefields are excited using a drive beam produced by a 14 MeV high current photoinjector-based linac. A second photocathode gun generates a 4 MeV witness beam which is used as a probe of the wakefields in the device under test. The delay of the witness bunch with respect to the drive bunch can be continuously varied from -100 ps to >1 ns. The drive and witness bunches propagate along collinear or parallel trajectories through the test section. A dipole spectrometer is then used to measure the energy change of the witness beam. The complete wakefield measurement system has been commissioned and wakefield experiments using dielectric structures are underway. Initial experiments have focused on collinear wakefield device geometries where the drive and witness bunches traverse the same structure. For attaining very high gradients we will construct and study step-up transformer structures in which the rf pulse generated by the drive beam is compressed transversely and longitudinally