ETH/Ion Beam Physics Laboratory, Zürich
Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) provides instrumentation originally developed by nuclear physicists more than 30 years ago to measure long lived cosmogenic radionuclides such as 10Be, 14C, 26Al, 36Cl, 41Ca, 129I, U, Pu and Pa at natural levels. In the past ten years impressive progress in the measurement technique has been made and with the appearance of compact low energy radiocarbon AMS systems, a new category of AMS instruments has been introduced. This has resulted in a boom of new AMS facilities with more than 20 new installations over the last five years. But low energy AMS is not limited to radiocarbon only and there is a great potential for 10Be, 26Al, 129I and actinides measurements at compact AMS systems. The latest developments towards the low energy limit of AMS resulted in two new types of systems, the NEC Single Stage AMS (SSAMS) and ETH mini carbon dating system (MICADAS) operating with terminal voltages of about 200 kV only. In addition, systems like the HVEE 1 MV Tandetron or the compact ETH 600 kV system are capable to extent the range of applications at compact systems beyond radiocarbon. These systems will have enormous impact, not only on the use of AMS in biomedical research and on radiocarbon dating but also for research applications with 10Be, 26Al, 129I and actinides.
ANL, Argonne
Funding: Work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
The construction of the Californium Rare Ion Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU), a new radioactive beam facility for the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS), is nearing completion. The facility will use fission fragments from a 1 Ci 252Cf source; thermalized and collected into a low-energy particle beam by a helium gas catcher. In order to reaccelerate these beams, the existing ATLAS ECR1 ion source was redesigned to function as an ECR charge breeder. The helium gas catcher system and the charge breeder are located on separate high voltage platforms. An additional high voltage platform was constructed to accommodate a low charge state stable beam source for charge breeding development work. Thus far the charge breeder has been tested with stable beams of rubidium and cesium achieving charge breeding efficiencies of 5.2% into 85Rb17+ and 2.9% into 133Cs20+.
IUAC, New Delhi
A 15 UD Pelletron electrostatic accelerator is in regular operation at Inter-University Accelerator Center (IUAC). It has been providing various ion beams in the energy range from a few tens of MeV to 270MeV for scheduled experiments. A superconducting linac booster module having eight niobium quarter wave resonators has been made operational for boosting the energy of the heavy ion beams from the Pelletron for experiments at higher energies. A new type of high temperature superconducting electron cyclotron resonance ion source (HTS-ECRIS) was designed, fabricated and installed. It is in regular operation as a part of an alternate high current injector (HCI) system being developed for injection of highly charged ions having higher beam current in to the superconducting linac. A radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) accelerator is being developed to accelerate highly charged particles (A/Q ~ 6) to an energy of 180 keV/A. The beam will then be accelerated further by drift tube linacs (DTLs) to the required velocity for injection of the beams to the linac booster. Details of various developmental activities related to the heavy ion accelerators and associated systems are reported.
INFN/LNL, Legnaro
ITEP, Moscow
The positive ion injector for the PIAVE-ALPI complex consists of an ECR ion source placed on a high voltage platform. A 14.4 GHz ECRIS named Alice, designed and constructed at LNL in the early &##8216;90, reliably delivered gaseous beams to the Superconducting RFQ PIAVE for nuclear physics experiments until 2008. The requests for heavy ion beams of increased current and energy, needed to perform the experiments planned for the next years with the AGATA demonstrator, prompted us to upgrade our injector with a new ECR source capable of higher output beam currents and higher charge states. This activity started in 2008 and was completed at the beginning of 2009. A 14.5 GHz, SUPERNANOGAN type ECRIS built by Pantechnik, was installed in our refurbished high voltage platform in July 2008. The space available for maintenance in the platform was increased and a new lead shielding for X-rays has been set up. The water cooling circuits have been redesigned to deliver different fluxes and inlet pressures to the equipment mounted on the platform (plasma chamber, extraction electrodes, bending dipole and power supply). A new safety system has been implemented in order to cope with new and more demanding safety rules. A lot of attention has been paid to the optimisation of the injection line with new diagnostic devices for beam characterisation (movable slits, emittance measurement tools). Commissioning of the new source and injector with beams has started and first results will be reported.
IPNO/IN2P3/CNRS, Orsay
GANIL, Caen
JINR, Dubna
Physics that motivated the building of the LISE magnetic spectrometer, main ideas exposed in the scientific council of GANIL June 4th 1981 by M. Brian and M. Fleury, were: atomic physics studies with stripped ions and the study of new isotopes produced by the fragmentation of beams. The LISE line is a doubly achromatic spectrometer (angle and position), with a resolution better than 10-3. Since the first experiment done in 1984, several improvements of the spectrometer were performed: use of a achromatic degrader (1987, used for the first time in the world), building of the achromatic deviation and the Wien Filter (1990), building of a new selection dipole and associated vertical platform (1994), building of the new LISE2000 line (2001), use of the CAVIAR detector (2002), building of the CLIM target (2007). Despite an extreme international competition, the LISE spectrometer remains a world-leader equipment using more than 50 % and up to 90 % of the beam time available at GANIL. This paper presents the status of CAVIAR detector which consists of a MWPC dedicated to in flight particle position at the first dispersive plane of LISE. Since two years, intensive efforts were done with the objective to make available a “plug and play” detector for nuclear physic experiment. We will describe the system from MWPC up to acquisition system. As example few experimental results will be presented.