Compressed ultrashort pulse injector demonstrator

High brightness electron beams have a wide range of applications ranging from accelerator-based light sources to ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy. High accelerating gradient photoinjector is an important tool to generate brighter electron beams. However, high gradient photoinjector suffers issues from material breakdown due to extremely high surface electric fields. One possible path to simultaneously achieve high gradient and suppress breakdowns is to reduce the rf pulse duration fed into the photoinjector. Such an approach was recently demonstrated at the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) facility where they commissioned an X-band photoinjector at 400 MV/m cathode field without significant breakdown rates. SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently developed rf pulse compression technology optimized for short pulses up to 500MW. We propose to develop an X-band photoinjector which can utilize these ultrashort rf pulses to produce surface fields at 500 MV/m or higher at the cathode. This presentation focuses on the design of the X-band photoinjector.