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- A new milestone achieved for the commissioning of the SPIRAL 1 upgrade
A new milestone achieved for the commissioning of the SPIRAL 1 upgrade
Tests for the upgrade of the SPIRAL 1 facility have been ongoing since January 2017. The latest tests show that all instruments are operational.
After successful completion of the installation phase in April, all the equipment of the upgraded facility was functioning during beam runs 1 and 2 of spring/summer 2017. The first series of tests permitted to reproduce the results obtained 2 years earlier with the charge breeder at the “Laboratoire De Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie (LPSC)” in Grenoble. Final technical adjustments were made during the summer shutdown to prepare run 3 with fully operational instruments.
Run 3 permitted a number of important achievements:
– Stable gaseous ion beams produced in the charge breeder were accelerated for the first time in the cyclotron CIME, and were delivered to different experimental rooms for various machine tests (36Ar@4MeV/A et 84Kr@10MeV/A). CIME was successfully restarted after a long period of shutdown.
– For the first time beams produced with the 1+ – N+ method were accelerated by the cyclotron CIME. A surface ionization source delivered alkali beams of 39-41K+ in the SPIRAL 1 cave. First separated in a magnetic dipole, the 1+ beams were then injected into the charge breeder to undergo a charge state transformation (1+ – N+ transformation). Beams of the 9+ charge state were then selected in a second magnetic dipole and transported to the CIME cyclotron for an acceleration to an energy of 7 MeV/A.
– The transition from a stable beam to a radioactive ion beam could be mimicked using the successive accelerations of 39K9+ – 40Ar9+ – 41K9+ beams.
These achievements demonstrate that the production and acceleration chain is operational as a whole for the upgraded SPIRAL1 facility. The measured efficiencies of the different processes involved in the chain were found to be according to expectations.
The last fine tunings and tests will take place in the first trimester of 2018, prior to the production of the first radioactive ion beams during run 1 of 2018.