The new photoinjector for the FERMI project

FERMI@elettra is a single-pass FEL user facility covering the spectral range 100-10 nm. It will be located near the Italian third generation Synchrotron Light Source facility ELETTRA and will make use of the existing 1.0 GeV normal conducting Linac. To obtain the high beam brightness required by the project, the present Linac electron source will be substituted with a photocathode RF gun now under development in the framework of a collaboration between Sincrotrone Trieste (ST) and Particle Beam Physics Laboratory (PBPL) at UCLA. The new gun will use an improved design of the 1.6 cell accelerating structure already developed at PBPL, scaled to 2998 MHz. We expect that the new gun design will allow a beam brightness increase by a factor 3-4 over the older version of the device. Some technical choices of the new design, including the enhancement of the mode separation, removal of the RF tuners, full cell symmetrization to limit the dipole and quadrupole RF field as well as an improved solenoid yoke design for multipole field corrections, will be discussed.