FRIB has achieved an important milestone by accelerating beams of neon, argon, krypton, and xenon through fifteen cryomodules.

The beams were accelerated to an energy above 20 million electron-volts per nucleon (MeV/nucleon).

In July 2018, FRIB accelerated its first beams of argon and krypton to the beam energy of 2 MeV/nucleon in the first three of forty-six cryomodules.

The heart of FRIB is a high-power superconducting linear accelerator that will accelerate ion beams up to half the speed of light to strike a target, creating rare isotopes. The linear accelerator is made of cryomodules, which contain superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities. The SRF cavities accelerate the beam while operating at temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero. Much like a heavy truck, heavy ion beams speed up slowly. The first fifteen cryomodules accelerate the beam to 10 percent of 200 MeV/nucleon. The remaining 31 cryomodules will provide the other 90 percent of beam energy.