Fabrication and Powering Test of a High-Temperature Superconducting Periodic Quadrupole Driving a Short-Length Transport Line for Laser-Plasma Accelerators

Laser-plasma accelerators, have extremely high accelerating gradients and can generate ultra-short electron bunches with micrometer bunch lengths which makes them a prominent candidate to drive the next-generation compact light sources and free-electron lasers (FELs). To fully exploit the advantages of this novel accelerating technology and to compensate for large chromatic effects in the beam transport line, novel compact beam optic elements based on high-temperature superconductor technology are studied. Moreover, the limited mechanical properties of the HTS ceramic-structured superconductors lead to many manufacturing issues during the coil winding process and to ease this difficulty, designing magnets with simple shape coils is of interest. In this article, the magnet design as well as the fabrication and test of a demonstrator of a periodic iron-core miniature HTS quadrupole is discussed. This magnet features simple pancake coils that are capable of providing high field gradients and in the experiments were successfully powered in liquid nitrogen and liquid helium showing no degradation.