UMD, College Park, Maryland
A common challenge for accelerator systems is to maintain beam quality and brightness over the usually long distance from the source to the target. In order to do so, knowledge of the beam distribution in both configuration and velocity space along the beam line is needed. However, measurement of the velocity distribution can be difficult, especially for beams with strong space charge. Here we present a simple and portable tomographic method to map the beam phase space, which can be used in the majority of accelerators. The tomographic reconstruction process has first been compared with results from simulations using the particle-in-cell code WARP. Results show excellent agreement even for beams with extreme space charge and exotic distributions. Our diagnostic has also been successfully demonstrated experimentally on the University of Maryland Electron Ring, a compact ring designed to study the transverse dynamics of beams in both emittance and space charge dominated regimes. Special emphasis is given to intense beams where our phase space tomography diagnostic is used to shed light on the consequences of the space charge forces on the transport of these beams.
LLNL, Livermore, California
LBNL, Berkeley, California
PPPL, Princeton, New Jersey
Voss Scientific, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Intense heavy ion beam pulses need to be compressed in both the transverse and longitudinal directions for warm dense matter and heavy ion fusion applications. Previous experiments and simulations utilized a drift region filled with high-density plasma in order to neutralize the space-charge and current of a 300 keV K+ beam, and achieved transverse and longitudinal focusing separately to a radius < 2 mm and pulse width < 5 ns, respectively. To achieve simultaneous beam compression, a strong solenoid is employed near the end of the drift region in order to transversely focus the beam to the longitudinal focal plane. Simulations of near-term experiments predict that the ion beam can be focused to a sub-mm spot size coincident with the longitudinal focal plane, reaching a peak beam density in the range 1012 - 1013 cm-3, provided that the plasma density is large enough for adequate neutralization. Optimizing the compression under the appropriate experimental constraints offers the potential of delivering higher intensity per unit length of accelerator to the target, thereby allowing more compact and cost-effective accelerators and transport lines to be used as ion beam drivers.