Extremely High Current, High-Brightness Energy Recovery Linac

Next generation light-sources, electron coolers, high-power FELs, Compton X-ray sources and many other accelerators were made possible by the emerging technology of high-power, high-brightness electron beams. In order to get the anticipated performance level of ampere-class currents, many technological barriers are yet to be broken. BNL's Collider-Accelerator Department is pursuing some of these technologies for its electron cooling of RHIC application, as well as a possible future electron-hadron collider. We will describe work on CW, high-current and high-brightness electron beams. This will include a description of a superconducting, laser-photocathode RF gun and an accelerator cavity capable of producing low emittance (about 1 micron rms normalized) one nano-Coulomb bunches at currents of the order of one ampere average.