Design and beam dynamic studies of a 30-MW superconducting linac for an accelerator-driven subcritical system

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) is working on the research and development of a 30-MW continuous wave (CW) proton linear accelerator (linac) for the JAEA accelerator-driven subcritical system (ADS) proposal. The linac will accelerate a 20 mA proton beam to 1.5 GeV, using mainly superconducting cavities. The main challenge for an ADS accelerator is the high reliability required to prevent thermal stress in the subcritical reactor; thus, we pursue a robust lattice to achieve stable operation. To this end, the beam optics design reduces the emittance growth and the beam halo through the superconducting part of the linac. First, we simulated an ideal machine without any errors to establish the operation conditions of the beam. Second, we applied element errors and input beam errors to estimate the tolerance of the linac design. Finally, we implemented a correction scheme to increase the lattice tolerance by reducing the beam centroid offset on the transverse plane. Massive multiparticle simulations and a cumulative statistic of 1 x 108 macroparticles have shown that the JAEA-ADS linac can operate with less than 1 W/m beam losses in error scenarios.