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Advanced Topographic Characterization Of Variously Prepared Niobium Surfaces And Linkage To Rf Losses, Chen Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Superconducting radio frequency (SRF) technology is widely adopted in particle accelerators. The shallow penetration (∼ 40 nm) of the RF into superconducting niobium lends great importance to SRF cavity interior surface chemistry and topography. These in turn are strongly influenced by the chemical etching "surface clean-up" that follows fabrication.;The principal surface smoothing methods are buffered chemical polish (BCP) and electropolish (EP). The resulting topography is characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM). The power spectral density (PSD) of AFM data provides a more thorough description of the topography than a single-value roughness measurement. In this work, one dimensional average PSD functions …