Intense Ion Ring Acceleration in a Flux Compressing Liner

Circular accelerators based upon increasing magnetic flux comprise one of the oldest classes of machines, the Betatron being a prime example. We have found that intense, charged neutralized ion rings can be accelerated to interesting energies by imploding a conducting liner on the field/ring configuration. Because the ring radius is not fixed, we find that the energy scaling varies from linear in the field (p²_θ ∝ B_Z) at low energies to square root scaling (γ ∝ B^&3x000BD;_Z) at relataivistic energies. Simple modeling has confirmed many of the characteristics we have seen in 2½-D fully electromagnetic particle simulations.