The FRIB Project has reached a new milestone: the extraction of the first ion beam from its Advanced Room-TEMperature Ion Source (ARTEMIS). On 12 October, FRIB staff turned on ARTEMIS for the first time, and the successful testing resulted in the first ion beam produced on 14 October. 

ARTEMIS is FRIB’s first accelerator component to be installed, which took place back in April. It is one of two electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion sources that FRIB will use to produce ions from elements. One room-temperature ECR (ARTEMIS) will support general-purpose operations and one superconducting ECR (SC-ECR) will provide high intensity for all elements including heavy ion beams like uranium.

In the ion source, neutral atoms are vaporized into a hot plasma, which knocks electrons off the atoms and ionizes them. The resulting ions are contained with electric and magnetic fields. Once ions of appropriate energy are produced, they will be extracted into the FRIB accelerator. 

Now that ARTEMIS is installed and is being successfully tested, the next step is to complete the installation of the FRIB front end to receive and transport the extracted beam of ions for further acceleration.