Recovery of acceleration field gradients of superconducting booster resonators by high pressure water jet rinsing

Kabumoto, Hiroshi  ; Takeuchi, Suehiro; Ishizaki, Nobuhiro  ; Yoshida, Takahiro*; Ishiguro, Takayuki*; Yamaguchi, Kazushi*

The JAEA-Tokai tandem accelerator was built for basic science researches with heavy ions. Its superconducting booster was completed in 1994 for increasing the acceleration energy of ions. The booster consists of 40 superconducting acceleration resonators and 10 cryostats. Every resonator is a coaxial quarter wave resonator (QWR) of which frequency is 129.8MHz, and optimum beam velocity is 10% of the light velocity. When it was built, the acceleration field gradients of superconducting resonators were 5.0MV/m at RF power input of 4W on their average. The performance decrease little by little, and it become 4.0MV/m now. Some of the resonators generate X-rays from a low electric field. A field emission will be occurred from small contaminations accumulated on the surfaces of niobium. We examined the high pressure water jet rinsing (HPWR) to re-recondition the superconducting booster. The HPWR is the technology of removing small contaminations on resonator surfaces, and very effective for the improvement of acceleration field gradients. The acceleration field gradients of 20 on-line resonators were improved from 4.4MV to 5.7MV on their average.