The ORNL radioactive ion beam project

On June 30, 1992, the Holifield Heavy Ion Research Facility (HHIRF) was shut down as an operating national users' facility for heavy ion physics research and became a construction project to reconfigure the existing accelerator system and develop a first-generation radioactive ion beam (RIB) facility. During its 11 years of operation, the HHIRF had over 600 users, of which 200 were graduate students. During this time, nearly 39,000 hours of beam were delivered as beam-on-target for nuclear, atomic, and applied research. All together, 69 different isotopes from 36 different elements were accelerated for scheduled experiments. Most beams were produced with only the 25-MV tandem accelerator; however, for the most energetic beams and the heaviest ions, the Oak Ridge Isochronous Cyclotron (ORIC) was used as an energy booster. This paper will briefly review the concept of the ORNL RIB project and describe the progress being made on the various hardware components and physics factors required to produce RIBs with the HHIRF accelerator system