Heavy-Ion Driver Linac for the RIA Facility and the Feasibility of Producing Multi-Megawatt Beams

The Rare-Isotope Accelerator (RIA) facility is a top priority project in the U.S. RIA is a next generation facility for basic research with radioactive beams that utilizes both standard isotope-separator on-line and in-flight fragmentation methods with novel approaches to handle high primary-beam power and remove existing limitations in the extraction of short-lived isotopes. A versatile primary accelerator, a 1.4-GV, CW superconducting linac, will provide beams from protons at 1 GeV to uranium at 400 MeV/u at power levels of 400 kW. Novel features include the acceptance of two charge states of heavy ions from the ion source and the acceleration of five charge states following the stripper foils. To achieve these goals, comprehensive beam dynamics studies have been performed to optimize the design of the driver linac. Recently we have investigated the feasibility of increasing the currents of light ions to deliver megawatts of beam power. This option is entirely possible from the beam dynamics point of view. It would require higher power from the rf system, as well as, increased shielding at the beam loss points with respect to the existing baseline design. Preliminary indications of the limitations of beam power for this class of CW superconducting linac for light ion beams will be presented