• J.K. Pozimski, R.D. Howard, S. Jolly
  Imperial College of Science and Technology, Department of Physics, London
• J.J. Back
  University of Warwick, Coventry
• M.A. Clarke-Gayther, D.C. Faircloth, S.R. Lawrie, A.P. Letchford
  STFC/RAL/ISIS, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon
• D.C. Plostinar
  STFC/RAL/ASTeC, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon

In order to contribute to the development of high power proton accelerators in the MW range, to prepare the way for an ISIS upgrade and to contribute to the UK design effort on neutrino factories, a front end test stand (FETS) is being constructed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK. The aim of the FETS is to demonstrate the production of a 60 mA, 2 ms, 50 pps chopped beam at 3 MeV with sufficient beam quality. The status of the FETS will be given and experimental results from the commissioning of LEBT and ion source will be presented. Previous measurements showed that the emittance of the beam delivered by the ion source exceeded our expectations by more than a factor of 3. Since then various changes in the beam extraction/post accelerator region reduced the beam emittance more than a factor of 2. The results from measurements will be compared with numerical simulations of the particle dynamics from the ion source to the end of the MEBT and the results discussed in respect to further work.