Challenges in low losses and large acceptance ion beam transport

A prototype of ion beam transport module has been developed at the Institut Pluridisciplinaire Hubert Curien (IPHC) and used as a test bed to investigate key issues related to the efficient transport of ion beams. This includes the reduction of the beam losses, the increase of the acceptance, and the definition of the instrumentation necessary to evaluate the performances. An experiment was performed on a full-scale beam line and following a standard beam analysis, steering, and focusing procedure. After a review of the developments carried out for some demanding facilities and for the design of the quadrupoles implemented in the transport module, the paper highlights the challenge of measuring the preservation of transverse phase-space distributions with large acceptance conditions, i.e. with the highest ratio of beam filling to quadrupole aperture. Then, the tolerance to the errors and mitigation of the risks are discussed, in particular by considering the electric stability of the transport module, beam trips, behavior of the tail and the halo, and misalignment errors.