On July 2^nd, the Accelerator Driven Sub-critical System (ADS) Injector I succeeded in accelerating a proton beam to 10.11 MeV with a peak beam current of 10.5 mA in pulse mode. This is a major breakthrough for the ADS Injector I, after five years of hard work by scientists from the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and marks a new step for high-current proton linear accelerator technology worldwide.

ADS Injector I is the world’s first proton accelerator using low-β superconducting (SC) Spoke cavities. A total number of fourteen SC Spoke012 (β=0.12) cavities reside in 2 cryomodules (CM1 and CM2) running at 2 K. The accelerating gradient of the cavity reached 7 MV/m.

ADS Injector I consists of an ECR ion source, a Low-Energy Beam Transport (LEBT) line, a 325 MHz Radio-Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ), a Medium-Energy Beam Transport (MEBT) line, a superconducting linac (CM1 and CM2) and a beam dump. During beam commissionin­g, the proton beam was accelerated to 3.2 MeV by the RFQ, and reached a final energy of 10.5 MeV with a beam current of 10.11 mA by using the SC Spoke cavities in CM1 and CM2. Beam transmission through the SC linac was 100%.

ADS has been proposed as a tool to generate electric power and to transmute nuclear waste. This is an important focus of development for future energy sources, as well as for research techniques like advanced neutron spallation. For more information about ADS, please visit: http://english.ihep.cas.cn/rs/fs/ADS/