Upgrade program of the high current heavy ion UNILAC as an injector for FAIR

Presently, the GSI facility consists of the heavy ion high current linac UNILAC and the synchrotron SIS 18. For the FAIR project the existing GSI accelerator complex is foreseen to serve as an injector for up to 1012 U28+ particles/s on the target. For this purpose an U28+ beam current of 15 emA inside of the SIS 18 acceptance is required from the UNILAC for the multi-turn injection to the synchrotron up to its space charge limit. Different hardware measures and careful fine tuning in all sections of the UNILAC during the last years resulted in an increase of the beam intensity of up to a factor of seven. To meet the FAIR requirements a further improvement of the beam brilliance at the synchrotron entrance of about a factor of five is necessary. Several upgrade measures are planned and are partially on the realization stage. Simultaneously experimental and numerical studies of the UNILAC are going on and directed to the optimization of the machine and to investigations of the influence of the upgrade measures to the performance of the whole accelerator.