Progress on the development of the CHAMP plasma accelerator

The Continuous High Average-power Microsecond Pulser (CHAMP) plasma accelerator is being developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The CHAMP accelerator uses a ballistically focused, magnetically insulated extraction diode for the plasma source. Four primary systems work in sequence to produce an ion beam; namely, the gas puff, the anode induction coil pulse, the magnetic insulation field coil pulse, and the accelerator pulse. As designed, the beam characteristics are E = 200--250 keV and I = 15 kA. The beam focus is an area approximately 2.5 in. in diameter with an energy density on the order of 10--100 j/cm2. The CHAMP accelerator is designed to produce a 1 microsecond long ion beam at a rate of 30 Hz, though at this time the system is only operated in single shot mode. Plasmas of hydrogen, helium, argon, and nitrogen are used. Most of the assembly and testing of CHAMP has occurred in the past 12 months. This includes plasma characterization for a static backfill, puff gas fill modeling and experimental characterization, puff fill plasma characterization, and beam extraction. This report details the progress of the assembly and testing as well as describes planned experiments and future upgrades. Most significant of the upgrades is the transition to continuous beam pulse operation