EURISOL Concept

A 4-year study was initiated in 2005, into various technological aspects of the project, in particular its instrumentation, and radiation protection. Its synergy with other projects, including the feasibility study for a new proposal for "beta beams", is being investigated. After this, possible sites will be evaluated, and the community of physicists will be ready for a full engineering design study, to be followed by the construction of the EURISOL structure.

The EURISOL concept consists in a superconducting linear accelerator, capable of generating protons with an energy of 1 GeV, with an impressive power of 5 MW. EURISOL will also be capable of accelerating deuterons, helium-3 atoms and ions of up to a mass of 40. The beams will simultaneously collide with two types of target, either directly or after conversion of protons into neutrons. The resulting unstable nuclei will be scattered out of the target, ionized and selected, and may then be directly used at a lower energy, or re-accelerated by another linear accelerator up to energies of 150 MeV per nucleon, thereby inducing nuclear reactions.