By Albe Larsen and Nan Phinney
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(Image Provided by Tor Raubenheimer) |
On December 4th, the NLC 8-Pack —designed to test
components under development for the NLC—demonstrated operation of the
SLED II dual-moded pulse compression system with a power of 475 MW and
pulse length of 400 ns.
This is a full demonstration of the system required for
NLC operation, and includes all critical components of the rf distribution
system. It achieves one of the two critical R1 goals needed to demonstrate
X-band technology which were established by the ILC-TRC review committee
earlier this year. This is an important milestone which is crucial for the
ultimate down select of the technology to be used for the next-generation
500 GeV (ultimately 1 TeV or above) center-of-mass energy linear collider.
The system continues to be pushed to higher power and has already operated
at 490 MW and 400 ns, in excess of the R1 goal.
