Beam Dynamics for High-Power Superconducting Heavy-Ion Linear Accelerator of RAON

Abstract

We investigated optimum choices of accelerator parameters for superconducting-technology-based heavy-ion linear accelerator (linac) to achieve the high beam quality at an in-flight target with a high beam power of 400 kW. The superconducting linac system is designed to provide a stable-ion beams from protons to uranium with energies of 600 MeV and 200 MeV/u, respectively. The linac optics is also designed such that the effects of envelope instability, parametric resonance between the transverse and longitudinal planes, beam steering effect due to asymmetric field in quarter-wave resonance (QWR) cavities, and emittance growth in charge strippers due to the straggling effect, parametric resonance, and envelope instability become as small as possible. The dimensions of the warm and cold sections in the low-energy section which mainly determine the longitudinal acceptance of the linac are optimized to achieve a longitudinal acceptance larger than 27 keV/u-ns enabling stable operation. The tracking simulation for the uranium beam was performed and we achieved the transverse normalized rms emittance of 0.095 mm-mrad and longitudinal rms emittance of 2.10 keV/u-ns at the end of designed linac without uncontrolled beam losses along the linac. In order to estimate the degradation of the machine performance due to imperfections such as misalignment, ripple of the magnet power source, and phase and power variation of the RF source, the particle tracking simulation was performed and the uncontrolled beam loss with the machine imperfection without the orbit and optics correction was less than 1 W/m which is a condition required for machine operation. The optimum scheme for orbit correction in the low-energy linac is investigated based on the transfer matrix of the elements and the validation of the scheme is confirmed by the particle tracking simulation using TRACK code.