Commissioning results and electron beam characterization at the S-band photoinjector at SINBAD-ARES

TL;DR

This paper reports on the commissioning and characterization of the electron beam generated by the RF photoinjector at DESY's ARES facility, demonstrating beam quality suitable for advanced accelerator research and applications.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed beam characterization and commissioning results of the ARES RF photoinjector, highlighting its capabilities for high-quality electron beam production.

Findings

Electron beams meet the required charge and momentum specifications.

Beam parameters depend on RF settings and are well-understood.

All measured beam qualities fulfill operational requirements.

Abstract

Over the last years, the generation and acceleration of ultra-short, high quality electron beams has attracted more and more interest in accelerator science. Electron bunches with these properties are necessary to operate and test novel diagnostics and advanced high gradient accelerating schemes such as plasma accelerators or dielectric laser accelerators. Furthermore, several medical and industrial applications require high-brightness electron beams. The dedicated R&D facility ARES at DESY will provide such probe beams in the upcoming years. After the setup of the normal-conducting RF photoinjector and linear accelerating structures, ARES successfully started the beam commissioning of the RF gun. This paper gives an overview of the ARES photoinjector setup and summarizes the results of the gun commissioning process. The quality of the first generated electron beams is characterized in terms of charge, momentum, momentum spread and beam size. Additionally, the dependencies of the beam parameters on RF settings are investigated. All measurement results of the characterized beams fulfill the requirements to operate the ARES linac with this RF photoinjector.