Abstract
The U.S. Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) is a state-of-the-art neutron scattering facility delivering the world's most intense pulsed neutron beams to a wide array of instruments which are used to conduct investigations in many fields of science and engineering. Neutrons are produced by spallation of liquid Hg due to bombardment of short (∼1μs), intense (∼35 A) pulses of protons delivered at 60?Hz from a storage ring which is fed by a high-intensity, 1 GeV H- LINAC. This facility has operated almost continuously since 2006, with ion source performance increasing over those years, and currently providing 50-60?mA of H- ions with a duty-factor of 6% for maintenance-free runs of ∼120 days with near 100% availability. Ion source research and development at ORNL has played a key role in enabling and supporting these achievements: this report provides some historical highlights of this effort, describes our current ion source testing facilities, discusses the goals of the program and finally provides a snapshot of some of our ongoing R&D activities. In particular, we have recently simplified and improved the reliability of the plasma ignition gun for the external antenna ion source which is discussed in detail.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | 7th International Symposium on Negative Ions, Beams and Sources, NIBS 2020 |
Editors | Yuri Belchenko, Dan Faircloth, Scott Lawrie, Olli Tarvainen, Motoi Wada |
Publisher | American Institute of Physics Inc. |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9780735441095 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 30 2021 |
Event | 7th International Symposium on Negative Ions, Beams and Sources, NIBS 2020 - Oxford, United Kingdom Duration: Sep 1 2020 → Sep 10 2020 |
Publication series
Name | AIP Conference Proceedings |
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Volume | 2373 |
ISSN (Print) | 0094-243X |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1551-7616 |
Conference
Conference | 7th International Symposium on Negative Ions, Beams and Sources, NIBS 2020 |
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Country/Territory | United Kingdom |
City | Oxford |
Period | 09/1/20 → 09/10/20 |
Funding
A special thank you to Jeff Holmes for serving as a technical reviewer on this and many other of our publications. This manuscript has been co-authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). This research was supported by the DOE Office of Science, Basic Energy Science, Scientific User Facilities. The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan)