Acceleration schedules for a recirculating heavy-ion accelerator

Recent advances in solid-state switches have made it feasible to design programmable, high-repetition-rate pulsers for induction accelerators. These switches could lower the cost of recirculating induction accelerators, such as the “small recirculator” at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), by substantially reducing the number of induction modules. Numerical work is reported here to determine what effects the use of fewer pulsers at higher voltage would have on the beam quality of the LLNL small recirculator. Lattices with different numbers of pulsers are examined using the fluid/envelope code circe, and several schedules for acceleration and compression are compared for each configuration. For selected schedules, the phase-space dynamics is also studied using the particle-in-cell code warp3d.