Recently, scientists at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMP) , have  successfully  achieved  the accumulation and acceleration of  H₂⁺ to  400  MeV/u  with  the HIRFL-CSR facility  for  the first time. The accelerated H₂⁺ could be converted to energetic protons through stripping after extraction.

The H₂⁺, produced  with  the  IMP  ECR  ion  source,  was  first accelerated to 10 MeV/u by the HIRFL SFC cyclotron and then injected into the CSRm to reach energy of 400 MeV/u. Fig.1 shows the H₂⁺ beam current in the CSRm.

This achievement is of great importance to several fundamental and application studies at IMP, such as the research on hadron physics, Single Event Effect (SEE), proton radiography, etc.