Design Concept, Manufacturing and Performance of Test Structures (6 GHz or C-band) for the Linear Accelerator of the SwissFEL X-ray laser system

The goal of SwissFEL is to provide a source of extremely bright and short X-ray pulses enabling scientific discoveries in a wide range of disciplines, from fundamental research to applied science. To accelerate the electrons to an energy of up to 5.8 GeV a linear accelerator (LINAC) consisting of 104 C-band (5.712 GHz) accelerating structures each of a length of 2m is foreseen. We present the mechanical design of the accelerating structures. High precision manufacturing is applied in order to avoid a tuning step during fabrication. Following this production process several 0.3 m test structures have been produced and tested. First results including RF power tests are presented.