An overview of high voltage dielectric material for traveling wave kicker magnet application

Pulsed high power fast kickers are being used to change beam trajectories in particle accelerators. The fast rise and fall time of pulse waveform demands a transmission line structure for the kicker deflector design. The ideal design will be parallel metal plates. However, it uses very long straight sections to achieve the required deflection. In accelerators with constrained straight sections, high permeability materials such as ferrite have to be used to gain deflection efficiency. The transmission line kicker magnet is also referred as traveling wave kicker magnet. Its construction is based on distributed L-C cells along the longitudinal direction. The magnetic cells and capacitive cells are interleaved to simulate the characteristic impedance of a transmission line to minimize pulse reflection, and provide adequate frequency bandwidth to transmit the kicker pulse with fast rise and fall time. The magnetic cells are usually made of fertile ceramics, but the capacitive cells have been made with different materials. For traveling wave kickers with higher impedance, the parallel plate vacuum capacitor has been used in CERN and KEK design. Others have used ceramic capacitors, printed circuit boards, and high permittivity ceramics as the capacitive cell. The high dielectric material has the advantage of compactness for low impedance kicker magnet construction. It continues to be very attractive for future kicker magnet applications. The high voltage phenomena associated with high dielectric ceramic materials have been widely reported in many industrial application areas. Their implication in the traveling wave magnet application has to be well understood. In this presentation, the areas requiring further quantitative study will be outlined.