The 3-GeV rapid cycling synchrotron (RCS) of the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) is now in the final beam commissioning phase, aiming for a design output beam power of 1 MW. With a series of injector linac upgrades in 2013 and 2014, RCS developed a high-intensity beam test, and launched 1-MW beam tuning in October 2014. The most important issues in realizing such a high-power continuous beam operation are to control and minimize beam loss for maintaining machine activations within permissible levels. In RCS, numerical simulation was successfully utilized along with experimental approaches to isolate the mechanism of beam loss and find its solution. By iteratively performing actual beam experiments and numerical simulations, and also by several hardware improvements, we have recently established a 1-MW beam operation with very low fractional beam loss of a couple of ${10}^{-3}$. In this paper, our recent efforts toward realizing such a low-loss high-intensity beam acceleration are presented as a follow-up of our previous article, H. Hotchi et al. Phys. Rev. ST Accel. Beams 12, 040402 (2009), in which the initial beam commissioning status of RCS has been reported.

• Received 7 March 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.20.060402

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Published by the American Physical Society