This article deals with ion confinement in small open-ended magnetic devices, the electron cyclotron resonance ion sources (ECRIS) that were developed for multicharged ion production. The ECRIS are basically ECR-heated plasma confinement machines with hot electrons and cold ions. The main parameters of the ion population in ECRIS plasmas are successively analyzed, temperature, collisions, losses, ionization, confinement times, charge state distribution equilibrium, followed by the analysis of the gas mixing effect, a specific technique to improve the performance as an ion source. A series of experiments is described for the systematic analysis of the phenomena related to gas mixing. It is shown that high charge state optimization by gas mixing relies on a compromise between three criteria, ion losses, mass effect, and ionization rates. The article stresses the role of some fundamental plasma parameters for the next generation of high charge state/high intensity ion sources.

For the needs of future heavy ion accelerators, electron cyclotron resonance ion sources (ECRISs) should be able to deliver higher intensities and higher charge states. The 1e mA level intensity has already been reached by room temperature ECRIS for medium charge states of light elements (O6+, Ar8+). However, such level of intensity for heavy elements (like Pb27+ for CERN/LHC and GSI) requires more powerful ECRIS with higher electron densities (up to 1013 cm−3). On the other hand, an optimized magnetic configuration system has to be used in order to obtain the suitable compromise between the electron confinement and the high flux ion losses. Before the design of the future “high intensity ECRIS,” experiments have been performed with the superconducting SERSE source both at 18 and 28 GHz. After an overview of major results recently obtained, some scaling laws will be presented. Our results show that much larger intensities and charges can be reached with ECRIS. Then, we will show how the next ECRIS generation will look like, based on the scaling laws derived in the above-mentioned experiments.

Photoionization of Xe4+ to Xe7+ ions was studied by combining an electron cyclotron resonance ion source with synchrotron radiation. Multiconfiguration Dirac-Fock calculations were performed to interpret the data. Many autoionization lines were measured and identified, resulting from excitation of a 4d electron into nf and np orbitals followed by Auger decay of the excited states. Continuum photoionization is negligible for the higher members of the isonuclear series.