Flux trapping in superconducting accelerating cavities during cooling down with a spatial temperature gradient

Abstract

During the cool-down of a superconducting accelerating cavity, a magnetic flux is trapped as quantized vortices, which yield additional dissipation and contribute to the residual resistance. Recently, cooling down with a large spatial temperature gradient has attracted much attention for successfully reducing the number of trapped vortices. The purpose of the present paper is to propose a model to explain the observed efficient flux expulsions and the role of spatial temperature gradient during the cool-down of the cavity. In the vicinity of a region with a temperature close to the critical temperature Tc, the critical fields are strongly suppressed and can be smaller than the ambient magnetic field. A region with a lower critical field smaller than the ambient field is in the vortex state. As the material is cooled down, a region with a temperature close to Tc associated with the vortex state domain sweeps and passes through the material. In this process, vortices contained in the vortex state domain are trapped by pinning centers that randomly distribute in the material. The number of trapped vortices can be naively estimated by analogy with a beam-target collision event. Based on this result, the residual resistance is evaluated. We find that the number of trapped vortices and the residual resistance are proportional to the strength of the ambient magnetic field and the inverse of the temperature gradient. The residual resistance obtained agrees well with experimental results. A material property dependence of the number of trapped vortices is also discussed.