Argonne's CARIBU charge breeder breaks world record for efficiency

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have pushed the limits of charge breeding and broken a long-standing world record for ionization efficiency of solids.

Engineer Richard Vondrasek installs a new turbo pump on the Californium Rare Isotope Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU). CARIBU reached world record efficiencies for ionization efficiency of solids.

Argonne's Californium Rare Isotope Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU) project has reached 11.9 percent efficiency with metallic particles of rubidium. The previous metal record was 6.5 percent, using potassium, achieved at Laboratory of Subatomic Physics and Cosmology (LPSC) in Grenoble.

''There have been several improvements made that increased efficiency little by little until we finally reached record numbers, and we foresee even higher efficiencies in the future,'' said senior accelerator physicist Richard Pardo.

CARIBU is an Accelerator Improvement Project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Beams of stable isotopes from elements across the entire periodic table have been used at the Argonne Tandem-Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) for research in nuclear physics for many years.

But when additional protons or neutrons are added to originally stable isotopes, the nuclei eventually become 'particle unstable', emitting excess protons or neutrons. Neutrons, unlike protons and electrons, have no charge; therefore, many more can be added to a nucleus before it becomes unstable.