Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory (ARIEL)
overview
The Advanced Rare Isotope Laboratory (ARIEL) is the only purpose-built multi-user rare isotope facility in the world, as well as the world’s most powerful Isotope Separation Online (ISOL) complex.
ARIEL will enable world-class research on the nature of atomic nuclei, the origin of the heavy chemical elements, quantum materials and biomolecules, as well as medical isotopes for the imaging and treatment of disease. It will massively expand our rare isotope program by providing more exotic isotope species with very high intensities and by adding two production targets in parallel to the existing ISAC target station. Together, the three isotope production stations will allow us to fully exploit the numerous existing experimental facilities at ISAC.
At the heart of ARIEL is a built-in-Canada superconducting electron accelerator (e-linac) for isotope production via photo-production and photo-fission as well as a second proton beam line from TRIUMF’s cyclotron for isotope production via proton-induced spallation, fragmentation, and fission.
Building on TRIUMF’s 30-years of experience in nuclear medicine and life sciences research, the Institute for Advanced Medical Isotopes (IAMI) will be a major part of TRIUMF’s Life Sciences program for research into next-generation medical isotopes and radiopharmaceuticals.
The 520 MeV Cyclotron
how it works
ARIEL’s rare isotope facilities are comprised of the following main parts:
- Drivers: To create rare isotopes, the 520 MeV cyclotron and the new 30 MeV electron linear accelerator (e-linac) supply high energy protons and electrons respectively to power nuclear reactions in targets.
- Targets and Ion Sources: Targets are materials, for example uranium carbide, that when hit with a driver beam undergo nuclear reactions to produce rare isotopes. A coupled ion source strips an electron from these rare isotopes, ionizing them so that they can be manipulated in an electromagnetic beamline.
- Rare Isotope Beam Delivery Systems:
- Beamlines: Beamlines are specialized conduits for transporting, purifying and bunching rare isotopes from the target to experiments. The beamline includes all the components for preparing the beam, including mass separators, charge breeders and post-target accelerators.
- Mass Separators: From the diverse mix of hundreds of rare isotopes produced in a target, mass separators use the ratio between an ion’s mass and its charge to precisely separate-out the desired rare isotope and create a purified rare isotope beam. From the mass separator the rare isotopes can be delivered to low-energy experiments like TITAN in ISAC-I or accelerated to higher energies.
- Charge Breeders: Rare isotopes must often be further charged to enable their acceleration: the higher the charge, the more efficiently they are accelerated. Charge breeders remove more electrons to create positively charged ions.
- Post-Target Accelerators: Accelerators in ISAC I and II accelerate ions to the energies required for TRIUMF experiments studying nuclear reactions. For example, nuclear physics experiments such as TIGRESS in ISAC II require isotopes moving at 10-20% the speed of light
ARIEL components
Technical specifications
Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), as well as six provinces, with backing from 21 universities, construction of ARIEL is occurring in two major stages.
The first stage (2010-2014) included the construction of the ARIEL building as well as development of the e-linac, which produced its first accelerated beam in 2014.
The second stage involves the construction of the two target stations, associated laboratory and hot-cell infrastructure, as well as the rare isotope beam transport beamlines, mass-separator, and an electron-beam ion source for charge breeding. Additional beam delivery infrastructure, like the high-mass separator and the charge breeder, was funded in a separate CFI project (CANREB).