Development of a permanent magnet light ion source at CEA/Saclay

In France, the Spiral 2 project dedicated to radioactive beam production is based on a 40 MeV continuous wave (cw) deuteron Linac. This installation will allow extending the variety of accelerated particles to very heavy elements. Such beams will open research domains for the GANIL facility. To inject the requested 5 mA deuteron beam into the Spiral 2 Linac, the performance of the high intensity light ion source (SILHI) allowed us to propose such an electron cyclotron resonance source. SILHI, developed at CEA/Saclay, regularly produces high intensity (over 100 mA) proton or deuteron beams through a Phi 9 mm aperture. So for this project, the main modifications of the source design concern the permanent magnets which provide the axial magnetic configuration and the Phi 3 mm aperture. The source produced its first beam (proton) in 2004. This article will report the beam characterization while the source produced D+ beam with intensity as high as 7.0 mA. Recently, this permanent magnet source has been equipped with the Phi 9 mm plasma electrode. So high intensity proton beams reaching more than 100 mA are now extracted from this source. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.