The Piafe Project at Grenoble

Solveig Albrand
Institut des Sciences Nucleaires, Grenoble, France


Grenoble has the happy coincidere that the SARA, the heavy ion accelerator of the Institut des Sciences NuclÈaires is adjacent to the the high flux reactor of the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL). The PIAFE (1) project proposes the production of neutron rich ions with masses between 80 and 150, extracted from a Uranium 235 target close to the reactor core. After mass separation the ion beam would be transported to SARA for acceleration. Energies between 2 and 14 MeV/uma would be possible. The first phase of the project will verify the operation of the source. The beam will contain singly charged ions at 30KeV so low energy physics of exotic ions will be possible. Several interesting problems are posed for the control and command of PIAFE, principally due to the high level of radioactivity involved.


(1) "Production, Ionisation et Acceleration de Faisceaux Exotiques.". The project is a collaboration between laboratories from France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Russia.