A near-term ion-beam experiment to demonstrate pulse shortening

Abstract Short beam pulse at a target is essential for High Energy Density Physics and Heavy Ion Fusion (HIF). A technique for ion-beam pulse shortening by the reduction of longitudinal emittance has recently been developed. An experimental demonstration of this technique would be important not only for the long-term design of HIF and HEDP targets, but would have immediate applications for near-term target experiments as well. To this end, using 3D PIC simulation code WARP, we have designed an experiment based on beam parameters of the existing NDCX-II machine at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The proposed experiment only requires non-invasive beam current measurements at two existing diagnostic stations and the implementation of two induction cells with special voltage waveforms, one for energy correction and a second one for final pulse compression. We show that the final pulse length in the NDCX-II experiment can be shortened by 46%.