A two-year study of recirculating induction heavy ion accelerators as low-cost driver for inertial-fusion energy applications was recently completed. The projected cost of a 4 MJ accelerator was estimated to be about $500 M (million) and the efficiency was estimated to be 35%. The principal technology issues include energy recovery of the ramped dipole magnets, which is achieved through use of ringing inductive/capacitive circuits, and high repetition rates of the induction cell pulsers, which is accomplished through arrays of field effect transistor (FET) switches. Principal physics issues identified include minimization of particle loss from interactions with the background gas, and more demanding emittance growth and centroid control requirements associated with the propagation of space-charge-dominated beams around bends and over large path lengths. In addition, instabilities such as the longitudinal resistive instability, beam-breakup instability and betatron-orbit instability were found to be controllable with careful design.

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who all helped with the critical design and construction phases of this project. I would like to thank many others whose help on this project and processing this manuscript is appreciated. Some of these include Marie Byrd, Telesforo de la Cruz, Jim Semrad, and Dale Coleman. Some of the voltage distribution data was supplied by Richard Ness, and is greatly appreciated. The financial support by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Texas Tech University is appreciated. I owe my excellent education to the Department of Electrical Engineering at Texas Tech University. Finally, I would like to dedicate this work to my parents, C. M. Gordon and Barbara Gordon, who made it possible for me to achieve this goal, and to my wonderful wife, Jeanette, for her patience and encouragement.

A schematic of a typical resistively charged Marx generator is shown in Figure 1. Other Marx configurations Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory use inductors in place of the charging resistors. Our Marx (LANL) are developing a new solid-state high-voltage modulator replaces these linear charging elements with Marx modulator for the generation of pulsed power. The fast-recovery diodes [9], as shown in Figure 2. The diodes initial application of the LANL modulator is to provide provide a low-loss, low-impedance path for the Marx power to a magnetron that requires a 46-kV, 160-A, 5-ts charging current between pulses and a high-impedance rectangular pulse. This modulator technology is also path when the Marx bank is erected. being developed for other applications, including portable millimeter wave sources, a beam energy corrector for RCHG _Charge induction accelerators, and space-based power systems. The LANL solid-state modulator has several benefits, Lio + \ + including wave shape control, switch protection, efficiency, and compactness. The present paper describes Switch this source technology and its design.