A significant part of the experimental program at Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is dedicated to pbar physics requiring a high number of cooled pbars per hour. The primary proton beam has to be provided by a 70 MeV proton linac followed by two synchrotrons. The new FAIR proton linac will deliver a pulsed proton beam of up to 35 mA of 36 μs duration at a repetition rate of 4 Hz (maximum). The GSI heavy ion linac (UNILAC) is able to deliver world record uranium beam intensities for injection into the synchrotrons, but it is not suitable for FAIR relevant proton beam operation. In an advanced machine investigation program it could be shown that the UNILAC is able to provide for sufficient high intensities of CH 3 beam, cracked (and stripped) in a supersonic nitrogen gas jet into protons and carbon ions. This advanced operational approach will result in up to 3 mA of proton intensity at a maximum beam energy of 20 MeV, 100 μs pulse duration and a repetition rate of up to 2.7 Hz delivered to the synchrotron SIS18. Recent linac beam measurements will be presented, showing that the UNILAC is able to serve as a proton FAIR injector for the first time, while the performance is limited to 25% of the FAIR requirements.

Vacuum arc ion sources, Penning ion sources, and filament driven multicusp ion sources are used for the production of high current ion beams of a variety of metallic and gaseous ions at the GSI accelerator facility. For accelerator operation, the ion sources have to provide a stable beam over a long period of time with an energy of 2.2 keV/u and a maximum mass over charge ratio of 65. The status of beam time operation at the high current injector is presented here giving an outline on important ion source data, such as ion beam current, ion beam spectrum, transversal emittance, life time, duty factor, and transmission along the low energy beam transport section.

Increasing the brightness of the ion beam is a typical demand for any accelerator. In order to fill the heavy ion synchrotron (SIS) up to the space charge limit, higher pulse currents are necessary. The UNILAC is operated with a pulse length up to 6 ms and a repetition rate up to 50 s−1. For the injection into the SIS a pulse length of 300 μs at 0.3 s−1 is required. The transverse acceptance of the RFQ is 138 π mm mrad. According to Child’s law, the ion current density which can be extracted from a plasma source is for the space charge limited flow proportional to Φ1.5/d2. With Φ and d denoting the extraction voltage and the width of the extraction gap. One approach to generate higher ion currents is to increase the extraction voltage in the regularly used extraction system. However, the required beam velocity is fixed by the RFQ structure with 2.2 keV/u. The mass-to-charge ratio which is to be accelerated can be between 1 and 65, resulting in a total voltage drop from 2.2 up to 143 kV (extraction and postacceleration voltage). The other approach is to decrease the gap width in the extraction system, but there is an optimum in the aspect ratio. To generate an ion beam with a higher current at low energy, a triode extraction system operated in accel–decel (Uacc,Udec) mode is a possible solution. By applying a negative potential at the second electrode a higher extraction field strength can be achieved. The effects of extraction field, arc current, and ion energy on the extracted ion beam current and its emittance were investigated.

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To generate uranium ion beam with high current and high brightness to fill up the heavy ion synchrotron SIS to its space charge limit, the behavior of the uranium ion beam in the extraction system and the postacceleration system for a high current metal vapor vacuum arc ion source has been investigated using the KOBRA3-INP code. The beam trajectory and space charge map in the extraction system as well as space profiles and the emittance diagrams of the ion beam along the beam line are presented. The influences of degree of the space charge compensation on the characteristics of the extracted ion beam are discussed. The results show that the ion beam has to be space charge compensated from the screening electrode to the entrance of the acceleration gap; otherwise the transport would not be possible. Simulation also quantitatively supports the experimental results under the assumption of the full space charge compensation in the drift sections.