First commissioning results with the Grenoble test electron cyclotron resonance ion source at iThemba LABS

iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator Based Science (iThemba LABS) is a multi-disciplinary accelerator facility. One of its main activities is the operation of a separated-sector cyclotron with a K-value of 200, which provides beams of various ion species. These beams are used for fundamental nuclear physics research in the intermediate energy region, radioisotope production, and medical physics applications. Due to the requirements of nuclear physics for new ion species and higher energies, the decision was made to install a copy of the so-called Grenoble test source (GTS) at iThemba LABS. In this paper, we will report on the experimental setup and the first results obtained with the GTS2 at iThemba LABS.