Production of clean rare isotope beams at TRIUMF ion guide laser ion source

Hot cavity resonant ionization laser ion sources (RILIS) provide a multitude of radioactive ion beams with high ionization efficiency and element selective ionization. However, in hot cavity RILIS there still remains isobaric contamination in the extracted beam from surface ionized species. An ion guide-laser ion source (IG-LIS) has been implemented at TRIUMF’s isotope separator and accelerator (ISAC) facility that decouples the hot isotope production region from the laser ionization volume. A number of IG-LIS runs have been conducted to provide isobar free radioactive ion beams for experiments. Isobar suppression of up to 10 6 has been achieved, e.g. for Mg, Cd, Ga and other isotopes, IG-LIS however, still suffers from an intensity loss of 50-100× as compared to hot cavity RILIS. The work towards operating the IG-LIS in an optimized fashion and possible design improvements to the operational prototype for efficient and robust (radiation hard) on-line operation and recent SIMION ion optics simulation results as well as the ongoing development status of the IG-LIS are presented.