An Innovative Approach of Surface Polishing for SRF Cavity Applications

The damage layer produced during the Niobium sheets and cavity fabrication processes is one of the main reasons why cavities have to undergo an extensive surface preparation process to recover optimal superconducting properties. Today, this includes the use of lengthy, costly, and dangerous conventional polishing techniques as buffered chemical polishing (BCP), or electro-polishing (EP). We propose to avoid or at least significantly reduce the use of acids. We developed a novel method based on metallographic polishing of Nb sheets, consisting of 2–3 steps. We demonstrate that this surface processing procedure could be transferred to large dimensions and an industrialized scale thanks to the limited number of steps and its compatibility with standard lapping polishing devices.