Beam physics design of a superconducting linac

The China initiative Accelerator-Driven subcritical System (CiADS) project aims to design and build the world’s first accelerator-driven subcritical system demonstration facility. The facility will attain 2.5 MW thermal power in 2026 to realize accelerator-target-reactor coupling experiments. As the first approved accelerator-driven subcritical system facility, the CiADS driver linac will adopt cutting-edge accelerator technologies to achieve the challenging goals of high beam power and high reliability. The accelerator will operate in cw mode to produce a 500 MeV, 5 mA proton beam. To meet the extremely high demands on beam availability, the linac design lays strong emphasis on beam loss control and increased fault tolerance via a novel fault-compensation method. The accelerator complex consists of a room temperature front-end section, a main linac that employs superconducting accelerator technologies, and a high-energy beam transport line. The beam-loss-oriented beam dynamics design of the driver linac complex is presented in the paper.