General Lab Information

Dielectric Wakefield Acceleration (DWFA) Chamber

Located on beam line #1, the “DWFA chamber” has 160 liters of usable volume. Due to its size, it is mounted on a fixed platform. Hosted experiments include AE40 Inverse Gamma Source (IGS), AE39 Dielectric Wakefield Acceleration (DWFA), and Surface Wave Accelerator and Radiation Source Based on Silicon Carbide (SWABSiC).

Primary operational features include:

  • Easily removable lid, multiple flanges for windows & electrical feed through(s) for in vacuum motorized stages & translators, large internal area with breadboard for mounting a variety of interaction targets, beam diagnostics and miniaturized electron beam focusing and steering magnets. 
  • Beam profile monitors at interaction region as well as chamber entrance and exit.
  • Dedicated ion pumps (250 l/s total) with a port for one 200 l/s turbo pump. Operates in the 10-8 Torr range.

The chamber has a removable top cover to allow easy access to assemble flexible and complex in-vacuum experiment setups on a breadboard. The setups usually include magnets, mirrors, and waveguide structures mounted on multi-axis translation and rotation stages with stepper motor controls. Multiple ports serve connections to the beam line, electrical feed through(s), and viewports and radiation extraction. In recent experiments, assemblies of the permanent quadrupole and dipole magnets were mounted on translation stages in order to retract them from the beam axis to allow default beam optic configuration and alignment. Dielectric structures were also mounted on stages together with phosphor screens to make possible the fine beam alignment and full beam transmission through the tiny micron scale structures. The chamber is equipped with a two position beam profile monitor, where YAG crystal is used as a default and the OTR foil for micron size beam profile measurements.

DWFA chamber

Photo of open DWFA chamber, in-situ on beam line #1