A FET based kicker for a charge booster for the TRIUMF ISAC project

A charge booster unit is required as part of an upgrade to the ISAC facility at TRIUMF. ISAC is an isotope separator coupled to an accelerator. ISAC is presently capable of accelerating only isotopes with atomic mass up to 30. The charge booster will allow ISAC to accelerate all the masses in the periodic table. A fast kicker system has been built to study the characteristics of an existing charge booster, designed by ISN in Grenoble, to assess the suitability of using this charge booster at TRIUMF. This fast kicker will subsequently be used in the TRIUMF ISAC facility for time of flight separation of the chosen charge and to recycle the higher and lower charges back to the charge booster. This will increase the efficiency from 10% to 60%. The kicker system includes a pair of deflector plates. One plate is charged up to -3.5 kV by a FET based modulator, while the other plate is held at ground potential. The modulator consists of two stacks of FETs operating in push pull with variable output voltage, pulse width, and repetition rate from virtually DC to 52 kHz. The measured high voltage output pulse rise and fall times are 63 ns and the minimum pulse width is 350 ns. The maximum pulse width is dependent upon the repetition rate. The large dynamic range for the repetition rate and pulse width required a novel circuit design and control technique, which also resulted in an energy efficient kicker system. This paper describes the design of the kicker system and shows the results of measurements.