Niobium coaxial quarter-wave cavities for the New Delhi booster linac

This paper reports the design and construction status of a prototype superconducting niobium accelerating structure consisting of a pair of quarter-wave coaxial-line cavities which are strongly coupled with a superconducting loop. Quarter-wave resonators are two-gap accelerating structures and are relatively short, so that a large number of independently-phased cavities is required for a linac. Strongly coupling several cavities can reduce the number of independently-phased elements, but at the cost of reducing the range of useful velocity acceptance for each element. Coupling two cavities splits the accelerating RF eigenmode into two resonant modes each of which covers a portion of the full velocity acceptance range of the original, single cavity mode. Using both of these resonant modes makes feasible the use of coupled cavity pairs for a linac with little loss in velocity acceptance. Design details for the niobium cavity pair and the results of preliminary tests of multipacting behavior are discussed