High current proton source based on ECR discharge sustained by 37.5 GHz gyrotron radiation

Formation of hydrogen ion beams with high intensity and low transverse emittance is one of the key challenges in accelerator technology. Present work is devoted to experimental investigation of proton beam production from dense plasma (Ne > 10¹³ cm⁻³) of an ECR discharge sustained by 37.5 GHz, 100 kW gyrotron radiation at SMIS 37 facility at IAP RAS. The anticipated advantages of the SMIS 37 gasdynamic ion source over the current state-of-the-art proton source technology based on 2.45 GHz hydrogen discharges are described. Experimental result obtained with different extraction configurations i.e. single- and multi-aperture systems are presented. It was demonstrated that ultra bright proton beam with approximately 4.5 mA current and 0.03 π·mm·mrad normalized emittance can be produced with the single-aperture (1 mm in diameter) extraction, the corresponding brightness being 5 A/(π·mm·mrad)². For production of high current beams a multi-aperture extractor was used resulting to a record of 200 mA / 1.1 π·mm·mrad normalized emittance proton beam. The species fraction i.e. the ratio of H⁺ to H₂⁺ current was recorded to be > 90 % for all extraction systems. A possibility of further enhancement of the beam parameters by improvements of the extraction system and its power supply is discussed.