Commissioning of the Superconducting Ring Cyclotron for the RIKEN RI Beam Factory

Since 1997, RIKEN Nishina Center has been constructing the Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF) and succeeded in beam commissioning of its accelerator complex at the end of 2006. The world´s first superconducting ring cyclotron (SRC) is the final booster in the RIBF accelerator complex which is able to accelerate all-element heavy ions to a speed of about 70% of the velocity of light. Assembling of the superconducting sector magnets was completed in August 2005. The superconducting coils were successfully cooled down and excited for tests on many operational aspects: magnetic force, coil protection and quality of magnetic field, showing that they work as designed. After a series of tests the other components were installed and tested under stray fields from the sector magnets. Local magnetic shields were put to the components which could not work under the stray fields. After setups of beam vacuum and radio frequency, beam commissioning started. The first beam was extracted at the end of 2006 and the first uranium beam was extracted in March 2007.