PERLE A ‘STEPPING STONE’ FOR THE NEXT GENERATION ERLS

Abstract

PERLE (Powerful ERL for Experiments) is a novel Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) test facility, which has been designed to validate choices for a 50 GeV ERL foreseen in the design of the LHeC and the FCC-eh, and to later serve a set of dedicated nuclear and particle physics experiments. Its main thrust is to probe high current, continuous wave (CW), multi-pass operation with superconducting cavities at 802 MHz (and perhaps testing other frequencies of interest). With very high transient beam power (~10 MW), PERLE offers an opportunity for controllable study of every beam dynamic effect of interest in the next generation of ERL design and become a ?stepping stone? between present state-of-art 1 MW ERLs and future 100 MW scale applications. PERLE design features flexible momentum compaction lattice architecture for six vertically stacked return arcs and a high current, 7 MeV, photo-injector. With only one pair of four cavity cryomodules, 500 MeV beam energy can be reached in three re-circulation passes, with beam currents of about 20 mA. The beam is decelerated in three consecutive passes back to the injection energy. Work on the engineering design of PERLE has just begun.