Status of the LEHIPA project at BARC

A programme has been initiated in DAE to develop a 1 GeV proton accelerator for its ADS programme. This accelerator will be developed in 3 phases namely 20 MeV, 100 MeV and 1 GeV. The most challenging part is the development of the low energy injector, typically up to 20 MeV, because the space-charge forces are maximal at these energies. Therefore, at BARC, we have initiated the development of a Low Energy High Intensity Proton Accelerator (LEHIPA), which will consist of a 50 keV ECR ion source, a 3 MeV Radio-Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) and a 20 MeV Drift Tube Linac (DTL). The Low Energy Beam Transport (LEBT) and Medium Energy Beam Transport (MEBT) lines match the beam from the ion source to RFQ and from RFQ to DTL respectively. The main criteria for the design of the linac is to have minimum beam loss and emittance growth. In this paper, the present status of this project will be presented. (author)