After the successful 10-day-long unattended continuous operation of the liquid-lithium charge stripper, FRIB staff installed an electron-gun (E-gun) system into the stripper module.

FRIB is the first accelerator to use liquid lithium as a charge stripper. During operation, a pump continuously circulates the liquid lithium to produce a film. 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).

The E-gun system will evaluate the thickness of the lithium film. Optimum film thickness efficiently accelerates an FRIB beam. In addition, the E-gun system will measure the stability of the film, which is important to keep the FRIB beam quality.

The team is now operating the E-gun system and tuning the beam optics to guide and focus the beam on the lithium film.