Vacuum ballistic focusing is the straightforward method to obtain a heavy-ion beam spot size necessary to drive an inertial confinement fusion target. The beam is first expanded then focused to obtain the desired convergence angles at the exit of the last element. This is done in an attempt to achieve a focal spot size in which emittance is the limiting factor; however, aberrations and space charge will influence the spot radius. Proper scaling of particle energy, mass, beam current, beam emittance, and magnetic field replicates the dynamics of a full driver beam at the focus in a small laboratory experiment. By scaling the beam current to similar to 100 A, 160 keV Cs+ has been used to study experimentally a proposed driver design at one-tenth scale. Once a nominal focal spot is achieved, the magnet strengths are deliberately de-tuned to simulate the effect of an off-momentum slice of the beam. Additionally, several methods will be used to inject electrons into beam following the last focusing element in order to study the neutralization of space charge and its effect on the focus. Transverse phase space and beam current density measurements at various stages of the focus will be presented as well spot size measurements from the various trials. This data will be compared to the results of a PIC model of the experiment. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
