The superconducting cavities in an Energy-Recovery-Linac will be operated with a high loaded Q of several 107, possible up to 108. Not only has no prior control system ever stabilized the RF field in a linac cavity with such high loaded Q, but also highest field stability in amplitude and phase is required at this high loaded Q. Because of a resulting bandwidth of the cavity of only a few Hz, this presents a significant challenge: the field in the cavity extremely sensitive to any perturbation of the cavity resonance frequency due to microphonics and Lorentz force detuning. To prove that the RF field in a high loaded Q cavity can be stabilized, and that Cornell's newly developed digital control system is able to achieve this, the system was connected to a high loaded Q cavity at the JLab IR-FEL. Excellent cw field stability--about 10−4 rms in relative amplitude and 0.02 deg rms in phase--was achieved at a loaded Q of 2.1 x 107 and 1.2 x 108, setting a new record in high loaded Q operation of a linac cavity. Piezo tuner based cavity frequency control proved to be very effective in keeping the cavity on resonance and allowed reliable to ramp up to high gradients in less than 1 second.

We have installed two new cryomodules, one in the nuclear physics accelerator (CEBAF) and the other in the Free Electron Laser (FEL) of Jefferson Lab. The new cryomodules consist of 7-cell cavities with the original CEBAF cell shape and were designed to deliver gradients of 70 MV/module. Several significant design innovations were demonstrated in these cryomodules. This paper describes the production procedures, the performance characteristics of these cavities in vertical tests, results of tests in the new cryomodule test facility (CMTF) as well as the commissioning in the CEBAF tunnel and FEL. Performances and limitations after installation in the accelerators are discussed in this paper along with improvements proposed for future cryomodules.