Progress of the two-beam funneling experiment

The injector for a heavy ion inertial fusion (HIIF) driver has to provide a high current and small emittance ion beam which cannot be provided by one single ion source. The required beam will be reached by several funneling stages, where two identically bunched ion beams are combined into a single beam with twice the frequency, current and brightness. For the most critical first funneling stage a two-beam radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ), where two beams are bunched and accelerated in a single RF cavity, and a novel scheme for an RF funneling deflector, operating at low voltages, has been developed. With the use of convergent incoming beams, the funneling structure will be placed around the beam crossing position. The progress of the experiment, consisting of a combination of a two-beam RFQ with an RF deflector for funneling of two He(+)-beams at low energies will be presented. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.