FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
MSU, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
ANL, Lemont, Illinois, USA
The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University is building a heavy ion linear accelerator (linac) to produce rare isotopes by the fragmentation method. At energies between 16 and 20 MeV/u ions are further stripped by a charge stripper increasing the energy gain downstream in the linac. The main challenges in the stripper design are high power deposited by the ions in the stripping media and radiation damage to the media itself. To overcome these challenges, self-recovering stripper media are the most suitable solutions. The FRIB baseline choice is a high-velocity thin film of liquid lithium*. Because liquid lithium is highly reactive with air, we have implemented rigorous safety measures. Since May 2018, the lithium stripper system has been operated safely at an offline test site to accumulate operational experience. Recently, we successfully completed a 10-day long unattended continuous operation without any issue, which proved the reliability of the system. The next step is to characterize the lithium film stability with diagnostics. In 2020, we plan to bring the lithium stripper into the accelerator tunnel and commission it with ion beams.
*Jie Wei, et al., TU1A04, Proceedings of LINAC 2012, Tel-Aviv, Israel
