Surface preparation processing for superconducting cavities

Surface preparation is an important processing in production procedures of superconducting niobium cavities,deciding whether the performance of the niobium cavities can meet the specifications. A series of surface preparation methods and relevant apparatuses have been constructed at Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics(SINAP) and the standard procedures of cavity processing were established and successfully applied to different types of cavities. With standard surface preparation procedures on the 500 MHz 5-cell niobium cavity, the cavity accelerating voltage at T = 4.2 K reached 7.5 MV while its quality factor was still higher than 1 × 109.The accelerating gradient of the IMP-HWR010 cavity reached 4.9 MV/m with the quality factor of better than3 × 108 at 4.2 K.