Speaker
Description
Radioactive Ion Beams (RIB) have been produced for the past 70 years across a wide range of facilities, first based on the isotope mass separation online (ISOL) technique, and later by In-Flight (IF) fragmentation technique. While different new facilities spread across all continents, CERN has hosted some early facilities, and the longest one still in operation, ISOLDE, since 1964. It also hosts CERN-MEDICIS, a batch mode isotope mass separation facility, aiming at high radionuclide activities, and hence high RIB intensities. High Intensity can adopt a large range of definition in our field, which will depend to a large extend of the type of radionuclides and the accelerator used and accelerator chain to produce the desired beams. Intensities as low as a few ion/min (eg zeptoA) to few 1e9 ion/s (eg nanoA) produced online, or a few 1e12ion/s (eg microA) theoretically expected for online, or experimental long-lived, isotope production can all be considered “High Intensity”. This wide range of orders of magnitudes originate from the intrinsic limitations related to the isotope production in the target, to efficiencies related to their ionization and acceleration, to the sometimes-short-half-life of the considered radionuclides, and to the difficulty to handle and maintain facilities with significant radiological risks. The lecture will give a general introduction of these different elements and provide a range of selected examples thus illustrating the present state of the art of the field of “High Intensity” HI-RIB production.