Striving for intense beams from the Texas A&M K500 cyclotron

Recently, our efforts on increasing the extracted beam intensity from our K500 superconducting cyclotron at Texas A&M University have increased in the interest of supporting secondary radioactive beam experiments. We are pursuing plans to upgrade our ECR ion source. such as employing two frequency microwaves for plasma heating, and to clean up our injection line optics to get more beam into the cyclotron. However, the bottleneck will be the performance of the deflectors.. In this report, we will describe our general beam tuning procedures and our current cyclotron performance. We will then focus on the properties of three recent beams, two with large beam currents and one with an exceptional extraction efficiency, in order to learn and to extend the performance of our cyclotron.