The CEA teams in collaboration with those of ESS worked for many months on the conditioning of the RFQ delivered to ESS in 2019. On 28 July 2021, the conditioning was successfully completed with 110% of the nominal operating power and the beam passed through the RFQ for the first time on 26 November.
The conditioning of the RFQ marks the end of a multi-year process at CEA for this central component of the future ESS linear accelerator in Sweden.
On October 28, 2014, CEA signed a contract with the Israeli research center in Soreq (SNRC) for the construction of a accelerator called SARAF (SOREQ Applied Research Accelerator Facility) by IRFU teams. This agreement is materialized by preliminary and detailed study phases over a period of 18 months (2015 and 2016) opening up to a construction, testing and installation phase on the site that will last 6 years.
The aim is to build a superconducting linear accelerator capable of providing proton and deuteron beams of variable energy between 5 and 40 MeV with an intensity of up to 5mA. This facility is intended for fundamental and applied research in many fields.
The schedule, associated with this project, includes successively the delivery and installation on site and then the testing of three sub-assemblies:
- The medium energy line, MEBT (in 2020),
- The first cryomodule (in 2021),
- The three remaining cryomodules (in 2022
On December 4, 2019, mechanical reception of the RFQ provided by Irfu took place in the tunnel of the European Spallation Source (ESS) project in Lund, Sweden. Following the delivery of the RFQ on August 27, 2019, the installation immediately followed with the Irfu team present and guaranteeing its success over the following months.
