ADVANCED ULTRAFINE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR

The conceptual design of an Ultrafine Particle Radio Frequency Quadrupole (UFP-RFQ) accelerator is discussed. The results indicate that it is possible to accelerate 1 pm radius Al particles to velocities around 100 km/s in 100 m RFQ length. This accelerator can provide variable output particle velocity, with capability of handling different particle materials with different sizes. There are scientific, industrial and space applications in the collisions of such particles with targets. Recent results show that the Los Alamos National Laboratory (L4NL) 6 MeV Van de Graaff is capable of accelerating particles up to 30 km/s (I). The particles' masses are small (-1 O-149), so that the diagnostics are quite challenging. For larger particles (-10-l 'g), the velocity is lower (-10-15 km/s), so that the physics of higher velocity impacts cannot be explored with particles in the picogram mass regime. The increase in particle mass and speed available with a RFQ accelerator makes possible the use of wider range of powerful diagnostic techniques to address a greater variety of interests in the applied and basic scientific community. It also aids in overcoming some of the ambiguities in experimentation due to microstructural effects, when the impacting particle is so small that it interacts with a single grain in a metal, or one portion of a cumposite, heterogeneous target.