RI completed 14 RF stations for the SIS-100 acceleration system of the FAIR project

RI Research Instruments and the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung have recently completed the manufacturing of all 14 RF stations for the acceleration RF System for SIS-100, part of the FAIR project. FAIR, the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, is an international accelerator facility and one of the largest research projects worldwide, which is currently under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. One of its goals is to produce matter that usually only exists in the depth of space in a laboratory environment for research. This will enable scientists from all over the world to gain new insights into the structure of matter and the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to the present.

Based on a GSI design concept, RI developed the physical layout, the detailed manufacturing design, and the testing strategies for the ferrite loaded coaxial resonator including a tetrode-based power amplifier. Each RF station is capable of continuously providing up to 20kV peak accelerating voltage over a fast tunable frequency range of 1.1MHz to 3.2MHz. The power supplies were produced in cooperation with Ampegon AG, now Ampegon Power Electronics (CH).

After completion of a prototype system, the final integration and testing of 13 more systems took place at RI premises under rather special circumstances: The COVID 19 crisis hit us during the series assembly and testing of the 13 series systems. Nevertheless, we were able to work basically as scheduled, thanks, for instance, to the great flexibility of the GSI team who supported the acceptance testing remotely via video, and split RI teams working in shift operation.

Through this cooperation, we at RI gathered broad know-how for this specific type of acceleration systems. This puts us into a position to also support an industrial application of particle beams with two very similar acceleration systems which are about to be completed in the near future.
We would like to say a big thank you to everyone involved for his or her flexibility in these extraordinary times. We are looking forward to further support the FAIR project with challenging components and systems such as vacuum chambers and kicker systems.

For more details on the collaboration and the FAIR project, have a look at this news article by GSI:
https://www.gsi.de/en/start/news/details/2021/01/07/sis100_cavities10.htm?no_cache=1