ILC TESTING PROGRAM AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Cornell University’s superconducting cavity development program is one contributor to the global collaborative effort on critical SRF R&D for the ILC. We conduct R&D in support of the baseline cavity development as well as several alternate cavity development paths. For the baseline program we are preparing and testing ILC cavities. We have developed a new quench detection system and successfully applied it to ILC 9-cell and 1-cell cavities to find quench producing defects, which were characterized with subsequent optical examination. We have successfully repaired a 9-cell cavity using tumbling to raise the accelerating gradient from 15 to above 30 MV/m. We have identified quench producing defects in single-cell cavities using our largescale thermometry system and subsequently extracted and inspected the defect region with an SEM. For the alternate R&D, we are developing reentrant cavity shapes with 70 mm and 60 mm apertures, and a simpler, potentially faster and less expensive electropolishing method called vertical electropolishing. We are also assisting in developing new cavity vendors by rapidly testing singlecell cavities they produced to qualify their fabrication methods.