Beam loss studies in high-intensity heavy-ion linacs

Abstract

The proposed Rare Isotope Accelerator (RIA) Facility, an innovative exotic-beam facility for the production of high-quality beams of short-lived isotopes, consists of a fully superconducting 1.4 GV driver linac and a 140 MV postaccelerator. To produce sufficient intensities of secondary beams the driver linac will provide 400 kW primary beams of any ion from hydrogen to uranium. Because of the high intensity of the primary beams the beam losses must be minimized to avoid radioactivation of the accelerator equipment. To keep the power deposited by the particles lost on the accelerator structures below 1 W/m, the relative beam losses per unit length should be less than 10^{-5}, especially along the high-energy section of the linac. A new beam dynamics simulation code TRACK has been developed and used for beam loss studies in the RIA driver linac. In the TRACK code, ions are tracked through the three-dimensional electromagnetic fields of every element of the linac starting from the electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion source to the production target. The simulation starts with a multicomponent dc ion beam extracted from the ECR. The space charge forces are included in the simulations. They are especially important in the front end of the driver linac. Beam losses are studied by tracking a large number of particles (up to 10^{6}) through the whole linac considering all sources of error such us element misalignments, rf field errors, and stripper thickness fluctuations. For each configuration of the linac, multiple sets of error values have been randomly generated and used in the calculations. The results are then combined to calculate important beam parameters, estimate beam losses, and characterize the corresponding linac configuration. To track a large number of particles for a comprehensive number of error sets (up to 500), the code TRACK was parallelized and run on the Jazz computer cluster at ANL.