Commissioning of the negative ion testbed ELISE

The tests of the large RF driven sources for the ITER neutral beam system will be started on the neutral beam test facility PRIMA in Padua not before 2015. As an important intermediate step a half size ITER source has been designed at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) and will be operated on the new test facility ELISE (Extraction from a Large Ion Source Experiment) which is presently being commissioned. The target is to generate a negative ion beam of 20 A, accelerated to 60 keV. Up to now all components of the test facility are assembled, the power supply, the cooling and the control system have been commissioned and the first plasma will be initiated in September. In preparatory experiments the mutual inductance of two adjacent drivers has been investigated and the coupling of a total RF power of 280 kW to a similar half size source has been demonstrated.