A post-accelerator for the US rare isotope accelerator facility

The proposed rare isotope accelerator (RIA) facility includes a post-accelerator for rare isotopes (RIB linac) which must produce high-quality beams of radioactive ions over the full mass range, including uranium, at energies above the Coulomb barrier, and have high transmission and efficiency. The latter requires the RIB linac to accept at injection ions in the 1+ charge state. A concept for such a post accelerator suitable for ions up to mass 132 has been previously described [1]. This paper presents a modified concept which extends the mass range to uranium. A high resolution separator for purifying beams at the isobaric level precedes the RIB linac. The mass filtering process will provide high purity beams while preserving transmission. For most cases a resolution of about m/Deltam = 20000 is adequate at mass A = 100 to obtain a separation between isobars of mass excess difference of 5 MeV. The design for a device capable of purifying beams at the isobaric level includes calculations up to fifth order. The RIB linac will utilize existing superconducting heavy-ion linac technology for all but a small portion of the accelerator system. The exceptional piece, a very-low-charge-state injector section needed for just the first few NIV of the RIB accelerator, consists of a pre-buncher followed by several sections of cw, normally-conducting RFQ. Two stages of charge stripping are provided: helium gas stripping at energies of a few keV/u, and additional foil stripping at similar to680 keV/u for the heavier ions. In extending the mass range to uranium, however, for best efficiency the helium gas stripping must be performed at different energies for different mass ions. We present numerical simulations of the beam dynamics of a design for the complete RIB linac which provides for several stripping options and uses cost-effective solenoid focusing elements in the drift-tube linac. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.