EBIS charge breeder for radioactive ion beams at ATLAS

Abstract

The construction of the Californium Rare Isotope Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU) for the Argonne National Laboratory ATLAS facility is completed and its commissioning is being performed. In its full capacity, the CARIBU facility will use fission fragments from a 1 Curie (Ci) 252Cf source. The ions will be thermalized and collected into a low-energy ion beam by a helium gas catcher, mass analyzed by an isobar separator, and charge bred to higher charge states for acceleration in ATLAS. To reach energies E/A 10 MeV/u, one should inject ions with charge-to-mass ratio (q/A) ⩾ 1/7 into the ATLAS linac. In the first stage, the existing Electron Cyclotron Resonance (ECR) ion source will be used as a charge breeder. The maximum intensity of radioactive ion beams at the output of the gas catcher will not exceed 107 ions per second. A charge breeder based on an Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS) has significant advantages over the ECR option for ion beam intensities up to about 109 ions per second, providing 3-4 times higher efficiency and significantly better purity of highly charged radioactive ion beams for further acceleration. The proposed EBIS project for CARIBU will heavily utilize state-of-the-art EBIS technology recently developed at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This will allow us to reduce both the project cost and timescale, simultaneously insuring reliable technical realization of the cutting-edge technology. Several parameters of the CARIBU EBIS charge breeder (EBIS-CB) will be relaxed with respect to the BNL EBIS in favor of higher reliability and lower cost. Technical performance of the CARIBU charge breeder will not suffer from such a relaxation and will provide high efficiency for a whole range of radioactive ion beams. The goal of this paper is to present the initial design of the EBIS charge breeder for radioactive ion beams at ATLAS.