Compact High Current Heavy Ion Injector

To provide a compact high-brightness heavy-ion beam source for Heavy Ion Fusion (HIF), we have been experimenting with merging multi-beamlets in an injector which uses an RF plasma source. An array of converging beamlets was used to produce a beam with the envelope radius, convergence, and ellipticity matched to an electrostatic quadrupole (ESQ) channel. Experimental results were in good quantitative agreement with simulation and have demonstrated the feasibility of this concept. The size of a driver-scale injector system using this approach will be several times smaller than one designed using traditional single large-aperture beams. The success of this experiment has possible significant economical and technical impacts on the architecture of HIF drivers.