MSU, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
NSCL, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
FRIB, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
Accelerator facilities for radioactive beams and low energy nuclear physics such as FRIB require intense, stable ion beam currents in order to achieve required reaction rates for rare and undiscovered isotopes. Presently, the only way to produce intense Continuous Wave beams of highly-charged, medium to heavy-mass ions is with Electron Cyclotron Resonance Ion Sources (ECRIS). The complex nature of these devices causes temporal instabilities to occur, most notably: Slow and fast instabilities. Slow instabilities and drifts, occurring over hours, decay the beam current intensity due to variations in ambient and hardware conditions. These drifts require beam operators to constantly monitor and tune ECRIS plasma parameters in order to maintain experimental beam requirements. Fast instabilities, in the form of ms oscillations, occur at operational parameters needed for high-intensity, high-charge state beams. These oscillations cause sudden drops in beam current of the order of 30%. We present here initial results of recent measurements to investigate these instabilities. Results for slow instabilities indicate a linear decay of beam intensity following a sharp current drop due to a brief source conditioning period. Results for fast instabilities show a relationship between the frequency and amplitude of beam oscillations and the electric potential of the plasma chamber bias disk.
