The High Current Transport Experiment for heavy-ion inertial fusion

The High Current Experiment (HCX) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is part of the US program to explore heavy-ion beam transport at a scale representative of the low-energy end of an induction linac 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 (>4 μs) in alternating gradient electrostatic and magnetic quadrupoles. This experiment is testing - at driver-relevant scale - transport issues resulting from nonlinear space-charge effects and collective modes, beam centroid alignment and beam steering, matching, image charges, halo, electron cloud effects, and longitudinal bunch control. We present the results for a coasting 1 MeV K⁺ ion beam transported through the first ten electrostatic transport quadrupoles, measured with beam-imaging and phase-space diagnostics. The latest additions to the experiment include measurements of the secondary ion, electron and atom coefficients due to halo ions scraping the wall, and four magnetic quadrupoles to explore similar issues in magnetic channels.