2020

Development and Applications of High Intensity Ion Beams from Cyclotrons

by Dr Daniel Winklehner

Pacific/Honolulu
112 (Watanabe)

112

Watanabe

Description

In the field of the physics of particle beams we are constantly pushing the frontiers of highest energy, highest intensity, and best quality beams. These are strongly correlated parameters and often increasing one comes at the expense of reducing the others. However, through innovation and by leveraging physics (e.g. collective effects) we continuously reduce these tradeoffs. Recently, we have developed a very compact and cost-effective cyclotron-based driver to produce very high intensity beams. The system will be able to deliver continuous wave (cw) particle beam currents of >10 mA of protons on target in the energy regime around 60 MeV. This is a factor of 4 higher than the current state-of-the-art for cyclotrons and a factor of 10 compared to what is commercially available. All areas of physics that call for high cw currents can greatly benefit from this result; e.g. particle physics, medical isotope production, and energy research. In this colloquium, I will mainly focus on one example: using this accelerator to produce flavor-pure neutrino beams for the discovery-level IsoDAR experiment. I will present the innovations that I have introduced to overcome beam physics challenges, bringing us to the current state.  I will then briefly discuss medical isotope production with this machine, and I will outline the next steps that will boost the energy to 1 GeV and enable multi-megawatt cyclotrons for neutrino physics and accelerator driven systems.