Research process on key technologies of dielectric wall accelerator

The dielectric wall accelerator (DWA) is hot since it can work with accelerating gradient more than 50 MeV/m and has potential application to the proton cancer therapy. At the same time, a new concept accelerator DWA is under developing, while there are many technological and engineering problems to be solved. In this paper, the efforts to develop a 1 MeV proton injector based on DWA at CAEP are introduced. The samples of the high gradient insulator are made and tested under pulsed voltage mode, and can survive without flashover under the electric field of 160 kV/cm (120 ns, FWHM). The solid state pulsed power generator which consists of 15 Blumlein lines and corresponding photoconductive semiconductor switches can output voltage pulse up to 300 kV with a duration of 10 ns. A proton source is also developed for the 1 MeV proton injector.