Prototyping Activities for a New Design of the CERN's Antiproton Production Target

Antiprotons are produced at CERN by impacting intense proton beams of 26 GeV/c onto a high-Z water-cooled target. The current design consists in an Ir core target in a graphite matrix and inserted in a Ti-6Al-4V assembly. A new target design has been foreseen for operation after 2021 aiming at improving the operation robustness and antiproton production yield, triggering several R&D; activities during the last years. First, both numerical (use of hydrocodes) and experimental approaches were carried out to study the core material response under extreme dynamic loading when impacted by the primary proton beam. The lessons learnt from these studies have been then applied to further prototyping and testing under proton beam impact at the CERN-HiRadMat facility. A first scaled prototype consisting in Ta rods embedded in an expanded graphite matrix was irradiated in 2017, while in 2018, the PROTAD experiment will test different real-scale AD-Target prototypes, in which the old water-cooled assembly is replaced by a more compact air-cooled one, and different core geometry and material configurations are investigated. This contribution details these prototyping and testing activities.