Update on LUE-200 Accelerator Facility

Publications, 03 June 2025

The JINR Publishing Department issued a preprint entitled “LUE-200 Accelerator. Progress, capabilities, and development problems” P9-2025-16. The authors are employees of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics and the Laboratory of High Energy Physics at JINR Anatoly Sumbaev, Evgenii Golubkov, Igor Zhironkin, Alexey Kayukov, Valery Kobets, Kirill Mikhailov, Ivan Ponomarev, Artem Repkin, Konstantin Udovichenko, and Valery Shvetsov.

The article provides an update of the accelerator facility of the Laboratory of Neutron Physics of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research – the driver of an intense pulsed source of resonant neutrons. The general scheme of the linear electron accelerator and the features of its basic systems are presented. LUE-200 consists of two accelerating sections on a travelling wave with an operating frequency of 2856 MHz with SLED-type microwave power compression systems. The pulsed beam current at the accelerator output reaches 2 A with a pulse duration of 80–120 ns. With an average beam particle energy of 90–110 MeV and an acceleration cycle frequency of 50 Hz, the average beam power reaches 0.95–1.0 kW. The integral neutron flux (in the thermal and resonance energy range) from a non-multiplying W-target reaches values of ∼ 1.06 · 1012 s−1. The opportunities of further development of the accelerator are discussed.