Beam dynamics design and optimization of a standalone radio frequency quadrupole accelerator for swift heavy ions

Abstract A standalone high energy, 352 MHz radio frequency quadrupole (RFQ) design is presented, resulting into targeted energy gain of 1.8 MeV/u with a beam current of 1 mA for mass to charge (A/q) ratio ≤ 4. It avoids many separate stages of transverse and longitudinal matching of beams compared to a standard RFQ + DTL accelerator combination due to automatic adiabatic bunching, focusing and acceleration of the beam and thus prevent many beam diagnostic and vacuum components. It is compact (only 4.63 meters) comparatively to other accelerator of equivalent energy gain and operation is quite easy in terms of beam tuning. The beam dynamics and vane designs are presented in details using PARMTEQ and Poisson/Superfish code. Such an accelerator promises to be a good candidate for establishing compact and more efficient nuclear physics research facilities compared to electrostatic Pelletron accelerators.