Collective Acceleration of Heavy Ions

Results of experiments on the collective acceleration of H, He, N, Ne, Ar, and Kr ions with an intense relativistic electron beam (1.5 MeV, 30 kA, 30 ns) are reported. Using time-of-flight diagnostics, we found that the ion beam front velocity was approximately $v\approx 0.1c$ for each particle species. This corresponds to a maximum kinetic energy of 390 MeV for Kr.