Novel multi-beam front end for LANSCE accelerator facility

Abstract

The LANSCE accelerator facility has been in operation for 50 years performing important scientific support for national security. The unique feature of the LANSCE accelerator facility is multi-beam operation, delivering beams to five experimental areas. To reduce long-term operational risks and to realize future beam performance goals in support of the laboratory missions, we are developing a novel high-brightness Front End injector. The proposed injector includes two independent low-energy transports for H+ and H- beams merging beams at the entrance of a single RFQ. These beamlines also perform preliminary beam bunching before RFQ. The challenge of the present project is associated with the simultaneous acceleration of protons and H- ions with multiple beam flavors in a single RFQ, which has never been done before. The proposed injector must provide better than existing beam parameters while beam intensity is supposed to be increased by a factor of two and injection energy is reduced from 750 keV to 100 keV. The paper discusses the details of the design and presents injector parameters.