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Intense highly charged ion beam production is essential for high-power heavy ion accelerators. A novel movable Vlasov launcher for superconducting high charge state electron cyclotron resonance ion source has been devised that can affect the microwave power effectiveness by a factor of about 4 in terms of highly charged ion beam production. This approach based on a dedicated microwave launching system instead of the traditional coupling scheme has led to new insight on microwave-plasma interaction. With this new understanding, the world record highly charged xenon ion beam currents have been enhanced by up to a factor of 2, which could directly and significantly enhance the performance of heavy ion accelerators and provide many new research opportunities in nuclear physics, atomic physics, and other disciplines.

The superconducting electron cyclotron resonance ion source with advanced design in Lanzhou (SECRAL) is a superconducting-magnet-based electron cyclotron resonance ion source (ECRIS) for the production of intense highly charged heavy ion beams. It is one of the best performing ECRISs worldwide and the first superconducting ECRIS built with an innovative magnet to generate a high strength minimum-B field for operation with heating microwaves up to 24–28 GHz. Since its commissioning in 2005, SECRAL has so far produced a good number of continuous wave intensity records of highly charged ion beams, in which recently the beam intensities of ^{40}Ar^{12+} and ^{129}Xe^{26+} have, for the first time, exceeded 1 emA produced by an ion source. Routine operations commenced in 2007 with the Heavy Ion accelerator Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL), China. Up to June 2017, SECRAL has been providing more than 28,000 hours of highly charged heavy ion beams to the accelerator demonstrating its great capability and reliability. The great achievement of SECRAL is accumulation of numerous technical advancements, such as an innovative magnetic system and an efficient double-frequency (24+18 GHz) heating with improved plasma stability. This article reviews the development of SECRAL and production of intense highly charged ion beams by SECRAL focusing on its unique magnet design, source commissioning, performance studies and enhancements, beam quality and long-term operation. SECRAL development and its performance studies representatively reflect the achievements and status of the present ECR ion source, as well as the ECRIS impacts on HIRFL.

A new heavy-ion linac within a continuous-wave (CW) 4-rod radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) was designed and constructed as the injector for the separated-sector cyclotron (SSC) at the Heavy Ion Research Facility at Lanzhou (HIRFL). In this paper, we present the development of and the beam commissioning results for the 53.667 MHz CW RFQ. In the beam dynamics design, the transverse phase advance at zero current, σ_{0⊥}, is maintained at a relatively high level compared with the longitudinal phase advance (σ_{0∥}) to avoid parametric resonance. A quasi-equipartitioning design strategy was applied to control the emittance growth and beam loss. The installation error of the electrodes was checked using a FARO 3D measurement arm during the manufacturing procedure. This method represents a new approach to measuring the position shifts of electrodes in a laboratory environment and provides information regarding the manufacturing quality. The experimental results of rf measurements exhibited general agreement with the simulation results obtained using CST code. During on-line beam testing of the RFQ, two kinds of ion beams (^{40}Ar^{8+} and ^{16}O^{5+}) were transported and accelerated to 142.8 keV/u, respectively. These results demonstrate that the SSC-Linac has made a significant progress. And the design scheme and technology experiences developed in this work can be applied to other future CW RFQs.