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.