FRIB achieves accelerator milestones with acceleration of argon, krypton

22 November 2017

FRIB marked significant accelerator progress this past fall, with the successful commissioning of the front end. FRIB’s front end – where the ion beam will start – was completed in May 2017, 16 months ahead of schedule.

Following completion of the front end technical construction, in August a beam of argon ions was extracted from the Advanced Room-TEMperature Ion Source (ARTEMIS) room-temperature electron cyclotron resonance source with intensity necessary to achieve Key Performance Parameters (KPP).

Commissioning of the front-end system was authorized by MSU in September, culminating at the end of September in the acceleration of an argon beam (⁴⁰Ar⁹⁺) by the radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) to an energy of 500 kiloelectron-volt/nucleon through the Medium Energy Beam Transport (MEBT) line. In early October, a test beam of krypton (⁸⁶Kr¹⁷) was accelerated successfully by the RFQ to the end of the MEBT to the same energy.