47 Dziuba, Florian Aulenbacher, Kurt Barth, Winfried Basten, Markus Busch, Marco Gettmann, Viktor Heilmann, Manuel Kürzeder, Thorsten Miski-Oglu, Maksym Podlech, Holger Salvatore, Julian Schnase, Alexander Schwarz, Malte Yaramyshev, Stepan HIM PSU Proceedings of the 29th Linear Accelerator Conference Linear Accelerator Conference 2018 JACoW Publishing, Geneva, Switzerland Beijing, China 10.18429/JACOW-LINAC2018-THPO073 English 73 Future research programs at GSI in the field super heavy element (SHE) synthesis require high intense heavy ion beams above the coulomb barrier and high average particle currents. The upcoming demands exceed the technical opportunities of the existing UNIversal Linear ACcelerator (UNILAC). Consequently, a new dedicated superconducting (sc) continuous wave (cw) linac is crucial to keep the SHE research program at GSI competitive on a high level. Recently the first linac section, serving as a prototype to demonstrate the reliable operability of 217 MHz multi gap crossbar-H-mode (CH) cavities under a realistic accelerator environment, has been extensively tested with a heavy ion beam delivered from the GSI High Charge State Injector (HLI). Fulfilling its role as a key component of the whole demonstrator setup. The first sc 217 MHz CH cavity (CH⁰) successfully accelerated heavy ions up to the design beam energy and even beyond at high beam intensities and full transmission. In this contribution the rf commissioning and the first beam operation of the cavity is presented. Content from this work may be used under the terms of the CC BY 3.0 licence (© 2018). Any distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s), title of the work, publisher, and DOI. ; Proceedings of the 29th Linear Accelerator Conference ; 33, ; PUB:(DE-HGF)8, ; PUB:(DE-HGF)7, ; Contribution to a conference proceedings 2019 2018-09-16 - 2018-09-21 GSI-2019-00497 2018-09-16 - 2018-09-21 2019 https://repository.gsi.de/record/218579 https://doi.org/10.18429/JACOW-LINAC2018-THPO073