Commissioning of the Low Energy Demonstration Accelerator (LEDA) radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ)

Initial commissioning of a 6.7-MeV 100-mA RFQ is underway. The RFQ is part of LEDA, the He injector for the Accelerator Production of Tritium (APT) project. To benchmark the RFQ performance, beam physics experiments will be done with low and high current beams for both pulsed and cw beam operation. Commissioning efforts thus far have been limited to low-current pulsed beam LEDA operation. Measurements to fully characterize the RFQ will ultimately include the dependence of RFQ beam transmission on RFQ vane voltage, input beam energy, input match, and input transverse centroids. Other commissioning measurements for the RFQ will include output beam energy, phase, noise, transverse profiles, and transverse RMS emittances. This paper contains initial LEDA RFQ commissioning results, including RFQ pulsed output beam currents up to 40 mA.