Multipurpose beam pulsing system for the 12UD pelletron tandem accelerator at the university of Tsukuba

A beam pulsing system has been developed for a 12 MV tandem accelerator. The system consists of a pre-acceleration chopper, a klystron buncher and a post-acceleration chopper. The pre-acceleration chopper comprises a slow chopper and a fast travelling-wave chopper. Pulsed beams with widths in the range from 10 µs to ~2 s are obtained with the slow chopper, and the repetition periods can be varied from 70 µs to 4 s. The fast chopper produces ion bursts having widths between 0.05 and 0.8 µs with a duty factor of ~10%. The buncher is operated with the two choppers to obtain beam pulses as narrow as a few nanoseconds. Time-of-flight measurements yielded pulse widths 2–4 ns (FWHM) wide for ions in the mass range 1A28. The ratio of the dark to peak ion current was usually of the order of 10-4.