A proposal of using improved rhodotron as a high dose rate micro-focused x-ray source*

High energy X-ray computer tomography has wide application in industry, especially in quality control of complicated high-tech equipment. In many applications, higher spatial resolution is needed to discover smaller defects. Rhodotron have been used to produce high power CW electron beam in hundreds of kilowatts level. In this paper, we propose to use an improved Rhodotron to generate high brightness electron beam with high average power. Beam dynamics study shows that when producing tens of kilowatts electron beam, the normalized RMS emittance can be lower than 10 μm, and the relative RMS energy spread can be lower than 0.2%. The beam can be focused to a spot size of about 100μm, and converted to X-Ray by using a rotating target within several kilowatts beam power. Improved Rhodotron proposed in this paper is a good candidate of X-ray source for high resolution high energy industrial CT systems.