A SWEEP PLATE EMITTANCE SCANNER FOR HIGH-POWER CW ION BEAMS

Sweep plate scanners are preferred for emittance measurement due to their versatility, simplicity, and precision. At the Advanced Technology and Development Center of Northrop Grumman, we have routinely used these devices for characterization of injector beams with less than 20 W/cm2 average power density. To characterize higher power beams, like those required for production of tritium or for radioactive waste transmutation, the scanner pod and data collection algorithm must be redesigned due to the possibility of melting the scanner’s protective front face or distorting the precision entrance knife edges. Among the methods we have used to mitigate these effects, one consists of drastically reducing the amount of time required for data collection. In this method, the emittance scanner pod traverses the beam in two passes, each requiring less than 0.5 second. In the first pass, the phase space limits of the beam are determined. In the second pass, data is collected primarily within the phase space region limits determined in the first pass. In this way, enough points are collected to assure that the precision of the measurement is high, even though the data collection time for each scan is less than 0.5 second. This paper will describe the layout of the scanner components, the data collection electronics and algorithm, and the data analysis