PILAC: A pion linac facility for 1-GeV pion physics at LAMPF

A design study or a Pion Linac (PILAC) at LAMPF is underway at Los Alamos. We present here a reference design for a system of pion sources, linac, and high-resolution beam line and spectrometer that will provide 109 pions per second on target and 200-keV resolution for the (π+, K+) reaction at 0.92 GeV. A general-purpose beam line that delivers both positive and negative pions in the energy range 0.4--1.1 GeV is included, thus opening up the possibility of a broad experimental program as is discussed in this report. A kicker-based beam sharing system allows delivery of beam to both beamlines simultaneously with independent sign and energy control. Because the pionlinac acts like an rf particle separator, all beams produced by PILAC will be free of electron (or positron) and proton contamination. 4 refs., 6 figs