The design and construction of continuous wave (cw) superconducting (sc) high intensity linacs is a crucial goal of worldwide accelerator technology development. The standalone sc cw heavy ion HElmholtz LInear ACcelerator (HELIAC) is a common project of GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research and Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) under key support of Goethe University Frankfurt (IAP). In 2017 the first section of the linac has been successfully commissioned and extensively tested with heavy ion beam at GSI, featuring the capability of 216.816 MHz multi-gap Crossbar H-mode (CH) DTL-structures. At present, the first fully equipped cryomodule of the HELIAC is under construction. Six further superconducting CH cavities are being procured. The HELIAC beam dynamics concept foresees a total of twelve CH-cavities in order to accelerate ions with a mass-to-charge ratio of 6 up to a smoothly variable energy in the range 3.5 - 7.5 MeV/u. In this paper, an advanced compact and less complex layout is presented, where the same number of accelerating cavities can be accommodated in three instead of four cryomodules, thus also reducing the number of solenoids and rebunchers, required for beam focusing. In addition, the integration and linking of the HELIAC to the GSI accelerator facility will be outlined.

The recent layout of the Jülich High Brilliance Neutron Source (HBS) driver linac is based on short crossbar H-mode (CH) cavities operated at a fixed synchronous phase. In the last decades the computing power for the development of linacs, available to physicists and engineers, has been increased drastically. This also enabled the accelerator community to finally carry out the required R&D to generate further the idea of drift tube linacs with alternating phase focusing (APF) beam dynamics, originally proposed in the 1950s. This focusing method uses the electric fields in between the drift tubes (i.e., gaps) to provide subsequent transverse and longitudinal focusing to the beam along multiple gaps. The beam focusing properties within each gap are adjusted individually by means of the synchronous phase. As a result of the alternating phase focusing method, these linacs can operate completely without internal magnetic lenses. The R&D-program for the high brilliance neutron source HBS offered the opportunity to investigate the APF concept further in order to open this advanced concept for high duty-factor, high intensity hadron beam acceleration. Besides, a prototype APF-interdigital H-mode (IH)-cavity has been designed and is going to be build and tested in the next future.