Design of a High-Power Proton Linear Accelerator and Radio-Frequency Quadrupole for the Subcritical Systems Inc. Energy Amplifier

by Josh Yoskowitz (Subcritical Systems Inc.)

Thursday Jun 4, 2026, 3:00 AM → 4:00 PM America/Chicago

Abstract: Subcritical Systems Inc. (SSI, Austin, TX) is developing an Energy Amplifier (EA), an accelerator-driven system designed for efficient and safe nuclear energy generation. Central to this concept is a high-power continuous-wave proton accelerator capable of delivering a 1.5 GeV beam to the EA’s subcritical assembly at currents up to 14 mA, corresponding to a nominal beam power of 15–20 MW.

The accelerator will include a radio-frequency quadrupole (RFQ) and a five-section superconducting linear accelerator (linac). The RFQ bunches and accelerates the proton beam to 5 MeV at 100% duty factor. The RFQ design was optimized using the code RFQ Designer and the beam dynamics were modeled with Toutatis. The superconducting linac is composed of five cryomodule sections employing half-wave resonator, single-spoke resonator and elliptical cavity geometries to efficiently accelerate the beam to a final energy of 1.5 GeV. The beam optics throughout the linac were optimized using TraceWin.

In this seminar, the preliminary designs of both the RFQ and superconducting linac will be presented, and the current design challenges and future work will be discussed.