LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
In the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) accelerator, there are about 220 500-L/s ion pumps running all the time. The oldest pumps recorded in the current system were installed in 1983. All the ion pumps are diode type ion pumps. In 2017, we started to suffer from ion pumps trips in an accelerator module 15 (M15) that includes 3 500-L/s ion pumps and they caused beam down times of the accelerator during the production run cycles. This paper reports the details of these trips, how we found it was argon gas that was causing the trips and how we tried to reduce it.
