Design and construction of a high charge and high current 1-1/2 cell L-band RF photocathode gun

The Argonne Wakefield Accelerator has been successfully commissioned and used for conducting wakefield experiments in dielectric loaded structures and plasmas. Although the initial wakefield experiments were successful, higher drive beam quality would substantially improve the wakefield accelerating gradients. In this paper we present a new 1-1/2 cell L-band photocathode RF gun design. This gun will produce 10-100 nC beam with 2-5 ps rms pulse length and normalized emittance less than 100 mm mrad. The final gun design and numerical simulations of the beam dynamics are presented