Soreq Applied Research Accelerator Facility (SARAF)

The Soreq Applied Research Accelerator Facility (SARAF) [1, 2, 3], under construction at Soreq Nuclear Research Center (SNRC) in Yavne, Israel, is based on a superconducting high-power linear accelerator of protons and deuterons at medium-energy and high-current. Its cutting-edge specifications (Table 1) and unique liquid-metal irradiation targets [4, 5, 6] will make it one of the world-leading sources of neutrons from thermal to high energy, and radioactive nuclei from a large portion of the nuclear chart.

High intensity neutron beams with a wide energy range and large amounts of radioactive nuclei are powerful tools for exploring uncharted areas of basic and applied science. Neutrons are a unique analysis tool for understanding and improvement of fuels, batteries, computer chips, plastics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, agriculture, archeology, nuclear energy via fission and fusion and much more. Neutrons are used for research of nuclear structure and reactions, material science, molecular structure, biological molecules, and can be ‘smart bullets’ for destroying cancer cells in the body with minimal collateral damage. Radioactive nuclei are extensively used in nuclear medicine, both for imaging and therapy. Rarer radioactive nuclei are used to investigate element genesis in the universe, physics beyond the Standard Model, and nuclear structure far from stability.

Due to the novelty of SARAF's accelerator and target technology, it was divided into two phases, I and II. SARAF-I had low energy and high current to test and characterize the required accelerator and target technologies and was used between 2010 and 2019 for research that utilized its exceptional beams. The full project (SARAF-II, Table 1) was approved in 2015 and is planned to be operational by the middle of this decade. See Fig. 1 for the recently completed SARAF building.

SARAF I

SARAF II