Development of Advanced Modulators for Recirculating Heavy-Ion Accelerators

Heavy-ion accelerators are considered to be one of the promising driver alternatives for inertial fusion. * In a heavy-ion inertial-fusion driver, multiple beams of heavy ions are accelerated to the kinetic energies needed to ignite a fusion target. During acceleration, the beams of heavy ions are compressed from initial pulse durations of 10’s to 100’s of microseconds to a final pulse duration in the reactor of approximately 10 nanoseconds. The compressed beam of heavy ions is focused on the target in a reactor chamber where the energy released from the fusion reaction is converted to thermal energy and eventually to electricity.2 Several approaches for accelerating heavy-ions have been proposed including RF accelerators, conventional linear induction accelerators, multi-pulse linear accelerators and recirculating induction accelerators (recirculators).