Design and status of the front part of the REX-ISOLDE linac Original Research Article

The accelerator for the REX-ISOLDE experiment at CERN is a compact linac, which will accelerate neutron rich nuclei with A/q=4.5 to energies between 0.8 MeV and 2.2 MeV (duty cycle: 10%). Substantial components of the REX-ISOLDE linac, such as the mass separator, the four-rod RFQ, the IH-matching section and the IH-drift-tube structure, are developed, built up and tested at Munich. The design and status of these components and the results of beam- and rf-power tests—especially with the RFQ and the IH-structure—are presented in this paper.