Mitigation of electric breakdown in an RF photoinjector by removal of tuning rods in high-field regions

The pi-mode resonant frequency of the 1.6 cell SLAC/BNL/UCLA style RF photoinjector electron gun is conventionally tuned using cylindrical copper tuning pieces that extend into the full-cell cavity through holes in the side of the gun. This design begins to fail in many versions of this popular gun design at higher voltage levels, when the cavity undergoes electric breakdown in the vicinity of the tuners. In order to remove the tuners from the region of high electric field, mitigating this problem, the full cell geometry must be changed significantly. We report on a method of accomplishing this, in which we use a mechanical device of custom design to stretch the cavity structure of an existing photoinjector in order to tune the resonant frequency up by over 2 MHz. We present results of testing the modified photoinjector in an RF test bed with both copper and magnesium cathodes, succeeding in putting approximately 8-10 MW of RF power into the gun. This is an improvement over the 4 MW routinely achieved in a similar gun using conventional tuning methods installed at the UCLA Neptune laboratory.