Overview of the scientific objectives of the High Current Experiment for heavy-ion fusion

The High Current Experiment (HCX) is being built to explore heavy-ion beam transport at a scale appropriate to the low-energy end of a driver for fusion energy production. The primary mission of this experiment is to investigate aperture fill factors acceptable for the transport of space-charge dominated heavy-ion beams at high space-charge intensity (line-charge density ~0.2 μC/m) over long pulse durations (3-10 μsec). A single beam transport channel will be used to evaluate scientific and technological issues resulting from the transport of an intense beam subject to applied field nonlinearities, envelope mismatch, misalignment-induced centroid excursions, imperfect vacuum, halo, background gas and electron effects resulting from lost beam ions. Emphasis will be on the influence of these effects on beam control and limiting degradations in beam quality (emittance growth). Electrostatic (Phase I) and magnetic (Phase II) quadrupole focusing lattices have been designed and future phases of the experiment may involve acceleration and/or pulse compression. The Phase I lattice is presently under construction and simulations to better predict machine performance are being carried out. Here we overview: the scientific objectives of the overall project, processes that will be explored, and transport lattices developed