Negative ion beam formation, transport and acceleration

The BNL Neutral Beam Development Group is working on the development of negative ion based neutral beam systems, using high current density surface plasma sources of the magnetron and hollow cathode discharge (HCD) type. With the magnetron source, the plan is to transport a 2A D- beam through a bending magnet before acceleration to 200 keV. In experiments with a pulsed magnetron, 0.4A of H- was transported through a 900, n = 1, bending magnet with 80% transmission. With the lower operating pressure in the HCD source, close coupled acceleration will be applied. The MEQALAC, RFQ, and a dc accelerating scheme with periodic quadrupole focusing are considered for reaching higher energies. A preliminary experiment was performed with quadrupole beam transport and a 3.8 mA beam was transported through a series of twelve quadrupoles, with 3 mm apertures and a total length of 7.2 cm