LBNL, Berkeley, 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.
To uniformly heat targets to electron-volt temperatures for the study of warm dense matter, one strategy is to deposit most of the ion energy at the peak of energy loss (dE/dx) with a low (E < 5 MeV) kinetic energy beam and a thin target*. Lower mass ions have a peak dE/dx at a lower kinetic energy. To this end, a small lithium (Li+) alumino-silicate source has been fabricated, and its emission limit has been measured. These surface ionization sources are heated to {10}00-1150 C where they preferentially emit singly ionized alkali ions. Alumino-silicates sources of K+ and Cs+ have been used extensively in beam experiments, but there are additional challenges for the preparation of high-quality Li+ sources: There are tighter tolerances in preparing and sintering the alumino-silicate to the substrate to produce an emitter that gives uniform ion emission, sufficient current density and low beam emittance. We report on recent measurements of high ( up to 35 mA/cm2) current density from a Li+ source. Ion species identification of possible contaminants is being verified with a Wien (E x B) filter, and via time-of-flight.
*J.J. Barnard et al., Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research A 577 (2007) 275283.
LBNL, Berkeley, California
PPPL, Princeton, New Jersey
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.
Recent changes to the NDCX beamline offer the promise of higher current compressed bunches, with correspondingly larger fluences, delivered to the target plane for ion-beam driven warm dense matter experiments. We report modeling and commissioning results of the upgraded NDCX beamline that includes a new induction bunching module with approximately twice the volt-seconds and greater tuning flexibility, combined with a longer neutralized drift compression channel.
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
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Funding: Research Supported by US Department of Energy.
Plasma are a source of unbound electrons for charge netralizing intense heavy ion beams to focus them to a small spot size and compress their axial length. To produce long plasma columns, sources based upon ferroelectric ceramics with large dielectric coefficients have been developed. The source utilizes the ferroelectric ceramic BaTiO3 to form metal plasma. The drift tube inner surface of the Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment (NDCX) is covered with ceramic material. High voltage (~8kV) is applied between the drift tube and the front surface of the ceramics. A BaTiO3 source comprised of five 20-cm-long sources has been tested and characterized, producing relatively uniform plasma in the 5x1010 cm-3 density range. The source has been integrated into the NDCX device for charge neutralization and beam compression experiments. Initial beam compression experiment yielded current compression ratios ~ 120. Recently, an additional 1 meter long source was fabricated to produce a 2 meter source for NDCX compression experiments. Present research is developing higher density sources to support beam compression experiments for high density physics applications.
LLNL, Livermore, California
LBNL, Berkeley, California
Funding: Work performed under the auspices of US Department of Energy by LLNL under Contract DE- AC52-07NA27344 and by LBNL under Contract DE-AC03-76SF00098.
The Virtual National Laboratory for Heavy-Ion Fusion is developing a physics design for NDCX-II, an experiment to study warm dense matter heated by ions near the Bragg-peak energy. Present plans call for using about thirty induction cells to accelerate 30 nC of Li+ ions to more than 3 MeV, followed by neutralized drift-compression. To heat targets to useful temperatures, the beam must be compressed to a sub-millimeter radius and a duration of about 1 ns. An interactive 1-D particle-in-cell simulation with an electrostatic field solver, acceleation-gap fringe fields, and a library of realizable analytic waveforms has been used for developing NDCX-II acceleration schedules. Multidimensional source-to-final-focus simulations with the particle-in-cell code Warp have validated this 1-D model and have been used both to design transverse focusing and to compensate for injection non-uniformities and 3-D effects. Results from this work are presented, and ongoing work to replace the analytic waveforms with output from circuit models is discussed.
LBNL, Berkeley, California
LLNL, Livermore, California
PPPL, Princeton, New Jersey
Voss Scientific, Albuquerque, New Mexico
The Heavy-Ion Fusion Sciences Virtual National Laboratory is pursuing an approach to target heating experiments in the warm dense matter regime, using space-charge-dominated ion beams that are simultaneously longitudinally bunched and transversely focused. Longitudinal beam compression by large factors has been demonstrated in the Neutralized Drift Compression Experiment (NDCX) with controlled ramps and forced neutralization. Using an injected 30 mA K+ ion beam with initial kinetic energy 0.3 MeV, axial compression leading to ~100X current amplification and simultaneous radial focusing to a few mm have led to encouraging energy deposition approaching the intensities required for eV-range target heating experiments. We discuss the status of several improvements to NDCX to reach the necessary higher beam intensities, including:
- greater axial compression via a longer velocity ramp;
- beam steering dipoles to mitigate aberrations in the bunching module;
- time-dependent focusing elements to correct considerable chromatic aberrations; and
- plasma injection improvements to establish a plasma density always greater than the beam density, expected to be >1013 cm-3.
