Future Perspectives of the Legnaro National Laboratories: The SPES project

The aim of the SPES (Selective Production of Exotic Species) project is to provide high intensity and high-quality beams of neutron-rich nuclei to perform forefront research in nuclear structure, reaction dynamics and interdisciplinary fields like medical, biological and material sciences. SPES is a second generation ISOL radioactive ion beam facility, part of the INFN Road Map for the Nuclear Physics and supported by the italian national laboratories LNL (Legnaro) and LNS (Catania). It represents an intermediate step toward the future generation European ISOL facility EURISOL. It is based on the ISOL method with an UCx Direct Target able to sustain a power of 10 kW. The primary proton beam will be delivered by a Cyclotron accelerator with an energy of more then 40 MeV and a beam current of 200 μA. Neutron-rich radioactive ions will be produced by Uranium fission at an expected fission rate in the target of the order of 1013 fissions per second. The exotic isotopes will be re-accelerated by the ALPI superconducting LINAC up to energies of 10-13 AMeV, for masses in the region of A=130 amu, with an expected rate on the secondary target of 108 pps.