Rare isotope beams at ISAC—target & ion source systems

The present status of the ISAC facility for rare isotopes beams after its first 10 years of operation is presented. Planning for the ISAC facility started in 1985 with the Parksville workshop on radioactive ion beams (Buchmann and D’Auria 1985). It was put on halt by the KAON proposal and planning was only resumed in 1993 after the cancellation of KAON. The ISAC facility was built to satisfy the scientific need for accelerated beams of rare isotopes for use in applications such as nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, atomic and condensed matter physics as well as medicine. At the time of the ISAC proposal submission, a number of facilities were either planned or under construction. In order to have an impact in the field, the requirements and specifications for the driver beam intensity on target was set to 100 μA, 500 MeV protons, which for ISAC results in a driver beam power of 50 kW.