Abstract:The ion source and Low-Energy Transport (LEBT) system that will provide H -ion beams to the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS)** Front End and the accelerator chain have been developed into a mature unit that fully satisfies the operational requirements through the commissioning and early operating phases of SNS. Compared to the early R&D version, many features of the ion source have been improved, and reliable operation at 6% duty factor has been achieved producing beam currents in the 35-mA range and above. LEBT operation proved that the purely electrostatic focusing principle is well suited to inject the ion beam into the RFQ accelerator, including the steering and pre-chopping functions. This paper will discuss the latest design features of the ion source and LEBT, give performance data for the integrated system, and report on commissioning results obtained with the SNS RFQ and Medium-Energy Beam Transport (MEBT) system. Prospects for further improvements will be outlined in concluding remarks.
INTRODUCTIONBerkeley Lab has just completed building the linac injector (Front End, FE) for the Spallation Neutron Source project (SNS), and the commissioning of the entire system is proceeding. The main subsystems are the H -ion-source, the low-energy beam-transport system (LEBT), the 2.5-MeV radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) accelerator, and the medium-energy beam-transport system (MEBT). Ion source and LEBT are the subject of this paper; their task is to create a 65-keV, 38-mA ion beam, to match and steer it into the RFQ, and to pre-chop it into mini-pulses of about 600 ns duration. The nominal duty factor is 6%, with 1-ms macro-pulse length and 60-Hz repetition rate.Based upon the main design features of the SSC ion source, 1 an R&D version of the SNS ion source was built first to demonstrate the viability of the chosen approach, utilizing an rf driven discharge inside a multicusp plasma generator with magnetic filter, cesium enhancement, and electron suppression at low energy.2 This source version did not allow implementing cesium enhancement and electron suppression at the same time, but both features were proven to work satisfactorily in separate tests.