ICAN: High power neutral beam generation

Abstract

During the last few years there is an increasing interest on the development of alternative high power new negative ion source for Tokamak applications. The proposed new neutral beam device presents a number of advantages with respect to: the density current, the acceleration voltage, the relative compact dimension of the negative ion source, and the coupling of a high power laser beam for photo-neutralization of the negative ion beam. Here we numerically investigate, using a multi-fluid 1-D code, the acceleration and the extraction of high power ion beam from a Magnetically Insulated Diode (MID). The diode configuration will be coupled to a high power device capable of extracting a current up to few kA with an accelerating voltage up to MeV. An efficiency of up to 92% of the coupling of the laser beam, is required in order to obtain a high power, up to GW, neutral beam. The new high energy, high average power, high efficiency (up to 30%) ICAN fiber laser is proposed for both the plasma generation and the photo-neutralizer configuration [1].