Design of a scaled recirculator for Heavy Ion Inertial Fusion

Abstract

An alternative concept for Heavy Ion Inertial Fusion (HIF) is the use of a recirculator to accelerate ion beams to energies in the range of 50–100 GeV [1]. The physics of an ion recirculator can be explored by means of scaled experiments in a compact machine like the existing University of Maryland Electron Ring (UMER). UMER has been successfully used for the study of the fundamental physics of space-charge-dominated transport using a 10 keV electron beam with up to 100 mA of current (or 10 nC per a 100 ns pulse) [2]. Due to the low energy and high perveance, the UMER beam accesses the same range of intensities as an HIF driver. In this paper we report on a computational study for the design of an acceleration stage for UMER using an induction cell. Using the two-dimensional transverse slice model in the particle-in-cell code WARP we show that it is possible to accelerate the UMER beam up to 20 keV without major modifications to the machine. Such acceleration enables future experiments on transverse resonance crossing and studies on longitudinal pulse behavior.