Gas injection and fast pressure-rise measurements for the Linac4 H− source

In the era of the Large Hadron Collider, the CERN injector complex comprising the 34 years old Linac2 with its primary proton source, is presently upgraded with a new linear accelerator for H− (Linac4). The design, construction, and test of volume production and cesiated RF-driven H− ion sources is presently ongoing with the final goal of producing an H− beam with 80 mA beam current, 45 keV beam energy, 500 s pulse length, and a repetition rate of 2 Hz. In order to have quantitative information of the hydrogen gas density at the moment of plasma ignition the dynamic vacuum properties of the plasma generator were studied experimentally. We describe the experimental setup and present fast pressure-rise measurements for different parameters of the gas injection system, such as gas species (H2, He, N2, Ar), piezo valve voltage pulse length (200 - 500 s), and injection pressure (400 - 2800 mbar). The obtained data are compared with a conductance model of the plasma generator