Heavy ion fusion sources

In Heavy-Fusion and in other applications, there is a need for high brightness sources with both high current and low emittance. The traditional design with a single monolithic source, while very successful, has significant constraints on it when going to higher currents. With the Child-Langmuir current-density limit, geometric aberration limits, and voltage breakdown limits, the area of the source becomes a high power of the current, A∼Ia8/3. We are examining a multi-beamlet source, avoiding the constraints by having many beamlets each with low current and small area. The beamlets are created and initially accelerated separately and then merged to form a single beam. This design offers a number of potential advantages over a monolithic source, such as a smaller transverse footprint, more control over the shaping and aiming of the beam, and more flexibility in the choice of ion sources. A potential drawback, however, is the emittance that results from the merging of the beamlets. We have designed injectors using simulation that have acceptably low emittance and are beginning to examine them experimentally.