On 7 July, CSNS team from China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) successfully accelerated a proton beam to 1.6 GeV in Rapid Cycling Synchrotron (RCS), marking a key progress in the beam commissioning, as well as an important milestone of the CSNS project.

The first round of RCS beam commissioning began on 31 May, and ended with a successful beam accumulation and extraction to the R-Dump on 5 June. The second round began on 3 July. On 7 July, the proton beam was accelerated to 1.6 GeV. Two days later, beam transmission rate became very close to 100%, with barely any beam loss through the whole process.

The RCS of CSNS is the first rapid cycling synchrotron in China. There are many theoretical and technical challenges in the design, construction and beam commissioning, one of which is to complete injecting, accumulating, accelerating and extracting a proton beam in 20 ms. Nevertheless, the CSNS team has spent a lot of efforts in overcoming the difficulties. “We have worked on improving the accelerator technology for CSNS for many years. We sacrifice our weekends and continue to work overtime. It was our join efforts that makes it successful.”Said Professor Sheng Wang, deputy director of the Accelerator Division of CSNS.