Beamline design for the transport of high intensity beams

At Laboratorio Nazionale del Sud high beam intensity tests have been carried out for xenon ion beams with the superconducting electron cyclotron resonance source SERSE. These tests confirmed the need to review the main concepts of the beam extraction analysis and transport when high currents of low energy beams are produced. It was demonstrated that the transport of low energy beams and the injection in the cyclotron becomes critical as soon as the extracted current exceeds a few milliamperes. The paper describes the main features of the GyroSERSE source, which is an upgraded version of the SERSE source, and the KOBRA-3D calculations carried out to obtain relatively low emittance beams. The study of the analysis beamline with the GIOSP code is also presented. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.