The origin of magnetic alloy core buckling in J-PARC 3 GeV RCS

We have been operating ten RF cavities loaded with magnetic alloy (MA) cores with a high field gradient of more than 20 kV/m in Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) 3 GeV Rapid Cycling Synchrotron (RCS) since September 2007. During 3 years operation, we detected three times the impedance reductions of RF cavities resulting from the buckling of MA cores. To find out the origin of the MA core buckling, we evaluated the thermal stress inside the MA cores in operation and studied the relationship between the MA core buckling and core structure. We figured out that the MA core buckling was caused by the thermal stress that was enhanced due to the impregnation with low viscosity epoxy resin. We improved the MA cores without the low viscosity epoxy resin impregnation and replaced all the cores in one RF cavity with them in March 2010. Up to now we operated the RF cavity loaded with the improved MA cores for 1500 h, it showed no impedance reduction and no buckling.