Improvement of voltage holding and high current beam acceleration by MeV accelerator for ITER NB

Taniguchi, Masaki; Kashiwagi, Mieko; Inoue, Takashi; Umeda, Naotaka; Watanabe, Kazuhiro; Tobari, Hiroyuki; Dairaku, Masayuki; Yamanaka, Haruhiko; Tsuchida, Kazuki; Kojima, Atsushi; Hanada, Masaya; Sakamoto, Keishi

At JAEA, MeV accelerator has been developed as a proof-of-principle accelerator for ITER NBI. To achieve the acceleration of 1 MeV, 200 A/m beam required for ITER, improvement of the voltage holding capability is essential. Review of voltage holding results ever obtained with various geometries of the accelerators showed that voltage holding capability was about a half of that for ideal small electrode. This is due to local electric field concentration in the accelerators, such as edge and corner between grids and its support structures. Based on these results, accelerator was modified to reduce the electric field concentration by reshaping the support structures and expanding the gap length. After the modifications, voltage holding capability in vacuum was increased from 835 kV to 1 MV. Voltage holding progressed the energy and current to 879 keV, 0.36 A (157 A/m).