COMMISSIONING THE DARHT-II SCALED ACCELERATOR

When completed, the DARHT-II accelerator will produce a 2-kA, 17-MeV beam in a 1600-ns pulse. After exiting the accelerator, the long pulse will be sliced into four short pulses by a kicker and quadrupole septum and then transported for several meters to a tantalum target for conversion to bremsstrahlung for radiography(1). In order to provide early tests of the kicker, septum, transport, and multi-pulse converter target we assembled a short accelerator from the first available refurbished cells, which are now capable of operating of operating at over 200 kV (2). This scaled accelerator was operated at ~ 8 Mev and ~1 kA, which provides a beam with approximately the same beam dynamics in the downstream transport as the final 17-MeV, 2-kA beam.