Design of a CW linac for the Compact Intense Fast NEutron Facility

• Published in: Nuclear instruments & methods in physics research. Section A, Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment Accelerators, spectrometers, detectors and associated equipment, 2019-06, Vol.930, p.156-166
• Main Authors: Li, H.P., Wang, Z., Lu, Y.R., Tan, Q.Y., Easton, M.J., Zhu, K., Guo, Z.Y., Gan, P.P., Liu, S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Beam quality; Drift tube linac; Error study; Radio frequency quadrupole
• ISSN: 0168-9002; 1872-9576
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2019.03.086

The proposed Compact Intense Fast NEutron Facility (CIFNEF) will have a wide range of applications, including the investigation of the exotic structure of neutron-rich nuclei, data for the nuclear fission, and the simulation of the neutron field in a star. To satisfy aims of producing high-intensity fast neutrons and forward neutrons with very low environmental background, the CIFNEF linac should have the capacity of accelerating continuous wave (CW) deuteron (D+), hydrogen (H2+) and lithium (7Li3+) beams to 2.5 MeV/u with maximum beam currents of 10 mA, 5 mA and 10 uA, respectively. Based on the above requirements, we proposed a novel compact linac using a combination of RFQ and DTL structures. The dynamics of RFQ and DTL are completed to meet all requirements and start-to-end simulation results show that the three ion species can be accelerated to the final energy with transmission efficiency above 99% as well as good beam quality with lower emittance growth. In addition, we performed error sensitivity analysis and combined error study to evaluate the error tolerance limits of the obtained design.