In March, FRIB successfully circulated liquid lithium in its charge stripper for more than seven days, relying only on remote monitoring.

FRIB is the first accelerator in the world to use liquid lithium as a charge stripper. This marks a new era in stripper development history. In August 2018, FRIB first successfully circulated liquid lithium and established a lithium film in its charge stripper.

During operation, a pump continuously circulates the liquid lithium to produce the film. The electromagnetic pump was designed and fabricated based on original concepts developed by Argonne National Laboratory.

The lithium charge stripper will play a critical role in the FRIB linear accelerator in order to achieve design-goal beam energies beyond 200 mega electron volt/nucleon (MeV/u) and beam power up to 400 kilowatts (kW).

In August 2018, the lithium charge stripper completed 50 hours of continuous attended operations with round-the-clock monitoring by subject matter experts. This new milestone of unattended operations for more than seven days demonstrates that the system can function without direct supervision by experts.