Improving transport and optimizing deceleration of ion beams from electron cyclotron resonance multicharged ion sources

Abstract

Electron cyclotron resonance ion sources (ECRISs) are widely applied for ion beam applications, e.g., plasma processing, cancer therapy, and ion engine of an artificial satellite. In our ECRIS, we aim at producing and extracting various ion beams from this device, in particular, Xeq+ ion beams at low energy. In the aerospace engineering field, there are problems of accumulated damages on various component materials caused by low energy of Xe ions from the engine. There are not enough experimental sputtering data for satellite materials at the Xeq+ in the low energy region. Then, we are trying to investigate the sputtering yield experimentally by irradiating the low energy Xe ion beams. To perform this experiment, it is necessary to acquire a certain amount of beam current with low energy. Then, we generate the low energy ion beams by the following steps: First, the ion beams are extracted from the ECRIS at high voltage. Next, these are transported to an ion beam irradiation system (IBIS). Finally, the ion beams are decelerated by the deceleration voltage in the IBIS. We adjusted the beamline. We measure the characteristics of the transport efficiency and decelerated ion beam currents. In this paper, we describe the experimental setup using an existing ECRIS for decelerated heavy ion beams and the results of decelerated ion beam currents.

Optimized deceleration characteristics of multicharged ion beams from electron cyclotron resonance ion source

“…Therefore, we attempted to decelerate the Xe q+ ion beam to the required energy after extracting at high voltage, normally 10kV. [4] In low energy ion beam irradiation experiments, it is necessary to control the beam energy of a hundred eV. We cannot neglect the contribution of the space potential of the plasma in the ion source of several tens of eV.…”