Developing high brightness beams for heavy ion driven inertial fusion

Heavy ion fusion (HIF) drivers require large currents and bright beams. In this article we review the two different approaches for building HIF injectors and the corresponding ion source requirements. The traditional approach uses large aperture, low current density ion sources, resulting in a very large injector system. A more recent approach merges high current density mini-beam lets into a large current beam and significantly reduces the injector size. Experiments are being prepared to demonstrate this approach. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.