A new microphonics measurement method for superconducting RF cavities

Mechanical vibrations of the superconducting cavity, also known as microphonics, cause shifts in the resonant frequency of the cavity. In addition to requiring additional RF power, these frequency shifts can contribute to errors in the closed loop phase and amplitude regulation. In order to better understand these effects, a new microphonics measurement method was developed, and the method was successfully used to measure microphonics on the half-wave superconducting cavity when it was operated in a production style cryostat. The test cryostat held a single β=0.1 half-wave cavity which was operated at 162.5 MHz Yue et al. (2013) and Wang et al. (2013) [1], [2]. It is the first time that the National Instruments PXIe-5641R intermediate frequency transceiver has been used for microphonics measurements in superconducting cavities. The new microphonics measurement method and results will be shown and analyzed in this paper.