Recovery Act - Development of Photonic Band Gap Structures for Particle Acceleration

As the dimensions of fundamental scientific and technological structures and processes become smaller, research in these areas is often limited to a few very large and costly particle accelerator facilities. A revolutionary approach utilizing photonic band-gap (PBG) microstructures offers the opportunity to develop compact highgradient inexpensive accelerators. A unique opportunity of this proposal is that this new generation of linear particle accelerator (linac) with a 20-100-fold increase in accelerating gradients relative to OFHC copper also provides potential revolutions in other fields that rely on the use of free electron bunches or beams. Among many examples are instruments needed for both the fabrication and characterization of nanostructures because these are typically based on high-energy electron and ion beams i.e. e-beam lithography, scanning and transmission electron microscopy, focused ion beams, X-ray sources, Auger spectroscopy and the like. - In Phase I Incom Incorporated (Charlton, MA) and Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) collaborated to fabricate PBG structures from borosilicate glass that serve as TM01 cavities and couplers when properly driven by lasers and will allow tests of basic concepts for PBG accelerators. Prototype PBG wafer structures fabricated by Incom in Phase I and based on SLAC calculations that predicted accelerating modes were fabricated and then analyzed by using CUDOS software. The results were extremely encouraging since the presence of modes, and their general behavior in the presence of fabrication errors agreed with the overall design calculations. SLAC concluded that the existence of an accelerating mode (determined by the photonic software calculations) for the as-built geometry provides a technical basis to proceed to Phase II and provides key guidance for adjusting the defect size slightly to tune the mode