The High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF), a major national scientific and technological infrastructure project, successfully passed a key performance test for its oxygen ion beam on December 12, setting a new world record for beam intensity.

The test was conducted in Huizhou City, Guangdong Province. On-site tests confirmed that HIAF generated the ¹⁸O⁶⁺ beam at an energy of 2.6 GeV per nucleon, with an intensity achieving 2.5×10¹¹ particles per pulse.

Following extensive discussions, the expert panel concluded that the measured beam intensity of the ¹⁸O⁶⁺ ions surpassed the facility's design specifications. They unanimously approved the passing of the oxygen ion beam performance test for the HIAF accelerator system.

The achieved intensity of 2.5×10¹¹ particles per pulse for the oxygen ions exceeds the previous international record of 1×10¹¹ particles per pulse, held for over a decade by the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany.

This milestone follows a series of rapid achievements since HIAF began its first comprehensive beam commissioning on October 27, achieving full beam commissioning within 24 hours. A second round of commissioning had started since November 22. The project team tackled a series of technical challenges during commissioning, including precise beam phase-space measurement and dynamic vacuum effects.

A panel of 13 experts from institutions including the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Peking University, the University of Science and Technology of China, oversaw the performance test.

Constructed by the Institute of Modern Physics of CAS (IMP), HIAF aims to provide the world's most intense pulsed heavy-ion beams and a multifunctional nuclear mass spectrometer with the highest precision. It is designed to be a world-leading platform for frontier research in nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, and for interdisciplinary applications that utilize heavy ion beams.