Effect of the gas mixing technique on the plasma potential and emittance of the JYFL 14 GHz electron cyclotron resonance ion source

Abstract

The effect of the gas mixing technique on the plasma potential, energy spread, and emittance of ion beams extracted from the JYFL 14 GHz electron cyclotron resonance ion source has been studied under various gas mixing conditions. The plasma potential and energy spread of the ion beams were studied with a plasma potential instrument developed at the Department of Physics, University of Jyväskylä (JYFL). With the instrument the effects of the gas mixing on different plasma parameters such as plasma potential and the energy distribution of the ions can be studied. The purpose of this work was to confirm that ion cooling can explain the beneficial effect of the gas mixing on the production of highly charged ion beams. This was done by measuring the ion-beam current as a function of a stopping voltage in conjunction with emittance measurements. It was observed that gas mixing affects the shape of the beam current decay curves measured with low charge-state ion beams indicating that the temperature and∕or the spatial distribution of these ions is affected by the mixing gas. The results obtained in the emittance measurements support the conclusion that the ion temperature changes due to the gas mixing. The effect of the energy spread on the emittance of different ion beams was also studied theoretically. It was observed that the emittance depends considerably on the dispersive matrix elements of the beam line transfer matrix. This effect is due to the fact that the dipole magnet is a dispersive ion optical component. The effect of the energy spread on the measured emittance in the bending plane of the magnet can be several tens of percent.