GANIL accelerator facility: status and perspectives

GANIL has been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first experiment that ran in 1983 with an 40Ar beam accelerated with two cyclotrons at the energy of 44 MeV per nucleon. Since this first exciting period, GANIL has undergone a continuous evolution and some major upgrades, guided by the needs expressed by users, to remain at the forefront of research in accelerator-based science.

An overview of the different GANIL projects will be presented. As a cornerstone, the commissioning of SPIRAL2 was carried out in different steps from 2019 to end 2021. The main results obtained during the commissioning stages and the strategy used by the commissioning team will be presented. The linac tuning is now validated with light and heavy ion beams that are sent to experimental hall for physics experiments. Issues on the beam sharing between the different experimental halls will be addressed. GANIL is also leading a European collaborative effort in order to unlock the effective use of AI techniques in accelerator research infrastructures, with possible applications to the users community.