Transverse beam combiner for ILSE

Summary

Previous heavy-ion fusion driver system studies suggest that transverse beam combining significantly reduces driver cost. In a combiner, several beams are brought together to a common transport channel which accommodates the increased line charge density. Combining intense beams increases the transverse emittance mainly due to the heating of the beam by space charge forces as the non-uniform original beam configuration becomes more uniform. The combiner itself introduces additional aberrations, which are small for the present design. Those aberrations are due to the reduced available space for the focusing electrodes and reduced clearance from the beamlets to the surrounding electrodes, thereby generating field aberrations and larger image forces. These aberrations can also lead to particle loss. We have studied a particular design of the proposed induction linac system experiment (ILSE) combiner which is a first-order achromat that tolerates a rather large fractional head-to-tail momentum tilt of ± 10%. Using a 2D particle-in-cell code we have found that ≈7% of particles are lost in the combiner. The emittance growth after the combiner is large enough so that the emittance growth due to combiner aberrations is unimportant. The scaled projection to a driver shows the growth is small enough to be tolerated. At present, methods of improving combiner design to reduce particle loss and to minimize emittance growth are being studied.