17th International Conference on Ion Sources

Production of Ruthenium-96 Ions for RHIC*

17 Oct 2017, 16:30

2h 30m

CERN

Poster presentation Negative ion sources Poster Session 2

Speaker

Dannie Steski (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Description

The 2018 heavy ion experimental program for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) requires the collisions of Ruthenium-96 (Ru-96) ions. The production of Ru-96 ions is challenging due to the low abundance of the 96 isotope in natural Ruthenium (5.52%) and the small quantity of isotopically enriched material available. To best meet the needs of the experimental program, the BNL Tandem Van de Graaff and a cesium sputter ion source will be used as the injector for the RHIC acceleration chain. A research program was started to minimize the amount of enriched material required while still satisfy the experimental requirements for intensity. The lifetime of the Ruthenium cathodes were also studied.

Acknowledgment

This work is performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy.