Using 100 GeV/nucleon accelerators for fusion and plasma experiments

With larger E/M it becomes easier to design accelerators to produce high specific deposition power, although overall efficiency becomes poor. To reach keV plasma temperatures, suitable for thermal X-ray sources to drive fusion targets, one may consider adapting existing facilities (e.g. at CERN), varying the design of already planned machines (e.g., the RHC at BNL) or designing new machines which could be used both as relativistic heavy-ion colliders and for driving plasma experiments. Beam cooling at full energy would be required in longitudinal degrees of freedom to produce pulse lengths down to 1 ns. To drive fusion pellets a cylindrical heat pipe would be used. A reference-concept system is described which could give 1 MJ of deposited energy into a 1 cm long target rod acting as a converter, reaching about 1 keV. The beam energy is 50 MJ. Cooling might be accomplished by a collisional-radiative scheme first proposed by Kilian, but its feasibility depends on low-velocity ion-ion charge-exchange cross sections which have not yet been measured and are difficult to estimate theoretically. The performance of the reference system depends on the degree of damping possible for the longitudinal microwave instability. (orig.)