Performance Evaluation of a Heavy Ion RF Linac

In a very general prospect we have analysed the practical performances of a RF linac having in mind a double purpose : a usual heavy ion accelerator running in a large range of masses for nuclear physics and a pulsed high current heavy ion accelerator which should be a test-bed for a heavy ion driver. In this paper we describe the main parts of the linac and we analyse the space charge current limitations in the bunch. The linac should be able to run at least in the 10 MeV/AMU range and in the pulsed regime it should deliver more than 1 joule per pulse.