Design, construction, and initial operation of the SNS MEBT chopper system

The chopper system for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) provides a gap in the beans for clean extraction from the accumulator ring. It consists of a pre-chopper in the low-energy bean transport (LEBT) and a faster chopper in the medium-energy beam transport (MEBT). We report here on the final design, fabrication, installation, and first beans tests of the MEBT chopper. The traveling-wave deflector is a meander-line design that matches the propagation of the deflecting pulse with the velocity of the beam at 2.5 MeV, after the radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) acceleration stage. The pulses uses a series of fast-risetime MOSFET transistors to generate the deflecting pulses of +- 2.5 kV with rise and fall times of 10 ns. We describe the design and fabrication of the meander line and pulsers and report on the first operation during initial beam tests at SNS.