A high-intensity superconducting H+ 3 cyclotron for isotope production

Abstract

We're concerned with future accelerators of high intensity protons for isotope production. To this end, we initiate a proposal to design an innovative superconducting H+ 3 cyclotron TR150, aiming at proton energy of 70–150 MeV and proton current of ∼ 1.0 mA. Cyclotrons in this energy range are not developed world-wide; moreover numerous highly interesting and increasingly demanded radio­nuclides are in this energy range. Our machine shall be designed to accelerate H+ 3 ion, the simplest and stable triatomic molecular ion, by injection from an external ion source and extraction by stripping. This has potential to extract proton beam of variable energies with very high extraction efficiency, and thus enables to simultaneously provide multiple proton beams for multiple external production targets. A baseline design of our machine and the beam dynamics studies are presented in this paper.