The increasing demands for electron beams with high quality and low timing jitter for accelerator-based applications such as ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM) and ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) have stimulated active efforts to develop suitable injectors for these accelerators. One promising direction in this regard is using of a bimodal rf gun operating in fundamental mode and a phase-locked harmonically-related higher mode. Work reported in this paper is on analysis and design of a bimodal rf gun operating in S-band as the fundamental and C-band as the second-harmonic modes. The rf design for such an rf gun includes the new design like directional coupler and rectangular mode launcher, which presented good transmission, low reflective cross-talk, and allowed multiple iterations of the modification. Compared to the fundamental mode, the new design achieved reduction in rf emittance and energy spread for MeV UEM initial distribution, and reduction in slope of flight time as function of injection phase for MeV UED applications.

• Received 12 April 2020
• Accepted 21 January 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.24.020401

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Published by the American Physical Society