FRIB ACCELERATOR STATUS AND CHALLENGES

Abstract

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at MSU includes a driver linac that can accelerate all stable isotopes to energies beyond 200 MeV/u at beam powers up to 400 kW. The linac consists of 330 superconducting quarter- and half-wave resonators operating at 2 K temperature. Physical challenges include acceleration of multiple charge states of beams to meet beam-on-target requirements, efficient production and acceleration of intense heavy-ion beams from low to intermediate energies, accommodation of multiple charge stripping scenarios (liquid lithium, helium gas, and carbon foil) and ion species, designs for both baseline in-flight fragmentation and ISOL upgrade options, and design considerations of machine availability, tunability, reliability, maintainability, and upgradability. We report on the FRIB accelerator design and developments with emphasis on technical challenges and progress.