On 25 January, the FRIB Project team delivered the first beam to the focal plane of the FRIB fragment separator in the transfer hall.

This follows the production of the first rare isotope on 11 December 2021, which demonstrated the fourth and last Key Performance Parameter for the FRIB Project. Today’s delivery of a 210 million electron-volts per nucleon argon-36 beam to the FRIB fragment separator focal plane demonstrates that the reconfigured A1900 magnets from the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory are integrated into FRIB, and that the technical scope supported by the FRIB Project is functional and complete.

FRIB’s fragment separator is the first three-stage fragment separator designed to handle up to 400 kilowatts of beam power to deliver rare isotopes to fast, stopped, and reaccelerated beam experiments. The fragment separator acts as a filter for the rare-isotope beam. When the beam strikes a target, it breaks into many reaction products. Among those products are the rare isotopes requested by experimenters. The mixture continues to speed through the fragment separator, where a series of magnets selects the desired isotopes for study and sends them to the experimental area. The fragment separator’s focal plane is where the beam is in focus, and scientists use detectors to identify specific particles. The transfer hall includes the last elements of the fragment separator and beam lines to deliver rare isotopes to the different experimental vaults of the facility.

”This achievement signals that the FRIB scope works as intended and FRIB is ready to support scientists in their discoveries,” said FRIB Laboratory Director Thomas Glasmacher. “FRIB will be able to produce most of the same rare isotopes that are created in the cosmos, and the three-stage fragment separator will select the rare isotopes of interest with unprecedented sensitivity.”
   

On 25 January, the FRIB Project team delivered the first beam to the focal plane of the FRIB fragment separator. The team was distributed to several separate control rooms for COVID-19 workplace safeguards.