Design of a CW linac for the Compact Intense Fast NEutron Facility

The proposed Compact Intense Fast NEutron Facility (CIFNEF) will have a wide range of applications, including the investigation of the exotic structure of neutron-rich nuclei, data for the nuclear fission, and the simulation of the neutron field in a star. To satisfy aims of producing high-intensity fast neutrons and forward neutrons with very low environmental background, the CIFNEF linac should have the capacity of accelerating continuous wave (CW) deuteron (D+), hydrogen (H₂⁺) and lithium (⁷Li3⁺) beams to 2.5 MeV/u with maximum beam currents of 10 mA, 5 mA and 10 uA, respectively. Based on the above requirements, we proposed a novel compact linac using a combination of RFQ and DTL structures. The dynamics of RFQ and DTL are completed to meet all requirements and start-to-end simulation results show that the three ion species can be accelerated to the final energy with transmission efficiency above 99% as well as good beam quality with lower emittance growth. In addition, we performed error sensitivity analysis and combined error study to evaluate the error tolerance limits of the obtained design.