Low-background prebunching system for heavy-ion beams at the Tokai radioactive ion accelerator complex

Okada, Masashi*; Niki, Kazuaki*; Hirayama, Yoshikazu*; Imai, Nobuaki*; Ishiyama, Hironobu*; Jeong, S. C.*; Katayama, Ichiro*; Miyatake, Hiroari*; Oyaizu, Mitsuhiro*; Watanabe, Yutaka*; Arai, Shigeaki*; Makii, Hiroyuki   ; Wakabayashi, Yasuo

A novel beam-bunching technique has been implemented at a heavy-ion linear accelerator facility by installing a compact two-gap prebuncher and a multi-layer beam chopper. A pulsed beam of 2 to 4 MHz, having kinetic energy up to 1.1 MeV/u, is realized by bunching 2 keV/u continuous beams just upstream of the linac. Around 40% of the continuous beam particles are successively gathered in a single micro-bunch with a time width of around 15 ns in units of full-width at one-tenth maximum. The number of background beam particles over 250 ns just before the bunched beam is well suppressed to less than 10 of the number of bunched particles. This technique has been adopted to generate intense -particle beams for nuclear astrophysics experiments.