Nuclotron

The Nuclotron SC proton synchrotron has three operation modes:

1) Acceleration of heavy ions for storage in the collider.
2) Acceleration of polarized protons and deuterons for feeding the collider.
3) Acceleration of both polarized and unpolarized protons and deuterons and heavy ions for internal target experiments or slow extraction to fixed target experiments.

In the first mode Nuclotron is operated as an element of the NICA collider injection chain and has to accelerate single bunch of fully stripped heavy ions (U⁹²⁺, Pb⁸²⁺ or Au⁷⁹⁺) from 0.6 to 1–4.5 GeV/u. The required bunch intensity is about 1–1.5⋅10⁹ ions. The particle losses during acceleration have to be minimized and do not exceed 10 %. The magnetic field ramp has to be ≥ 1 T/s.

In the second mode the Nuclotron will be used for acceleration of the polarized proton beam from 20 MeV up to 12 GeV kinetic energy and polarized deuteron beam from 5 MeV/u up to 5.6 GeV/u. The bunch intensity in this case is a few units of 10¹⁰ particles.

In the third mode the Nuclotron is operated similarly to the 1st or 2nd mode (depending on accelerating particles’ sort) with further slow extraction of particles to fixed target area instead of a beam transfer into the collider.