LBNL, Berkeley, California
LLNL, Livermore, California
Funding: This work was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Fusion Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Longitudinally compressed ion beam pulses are currently employed in ion-beam based warm dense matter studies. Compression arises from an imposed time-dependent longitudinal velocity ramp followed by drift in a neutralized channel. Chromatic aberrations in the final focusing system arising from this chirp increase the attainable beam spot and reduce the effective fluence on target. We report recent work on fast correction optics that remove the time-dependent beam envelope divergence and minimizes the beam spot on target. We present models of the optical element design and predicted ion beam fluence, as well as benchtop measurements of pulsed waveforms and response.
PPPL, Princeton, New Jersey
LLNL, Livermore, California
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Voss Scientific, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Funding: Research supported by the US Department of Energy.
Neutralized drift compression offers an effective means for particle beam focusing and current amplification. In neutralized drift compression, a linear radial and longitudinal velocity drift is applied to a beam pulse, so that the beam pulse compresses as it drifts in the focusing section. The beam intensity can increase more than a factor of 100 in both the radial and longitudinal directions, totaling to more than a 10,000 times increase in the beam density during this process. The optimal configuration of focusing elements to mitigate the time-dependent focal plane is discussed in this paper. The self-electric and self-magnetic fields can prevent tight ballistic focusing and have to be neutralized by supplying neutralizing electrons. This paper presents a survey of the present numerical modeling techniques and theoretical understanding of plasma neutralization of intense particle beams. Investigations of intense beam pulse interaction with a background plasma have identified the operating regimes for stable and neutralized propagation of intense charged particle beams.
