Download or read book Grid-controlled Metal Ion Sources for Heavy Ion Fusion Accelerators written by and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A variety of metal ions can be generated using vacuum arcs, but due to the nature of these arcs, the flux generated fluctuates in time. We have successfully employed electrostatically biased grids to control the plasma and to provide a well-behaved, space charge limited ion source. The grid prevents the plasma from entering the extraction gap before the main voltage pulse is applied. The extracted ion current is space charge limited, resulting in a constant output current even though the ion flux from the vacuum arc source varies considerably. There are several advantages over other conventional sources, for instance, thermionic sources are faced with heating problems especially for large area configurations, while gas-injection sources cause prefill problems because they take too long to reach equilibrium. We have performed extraction experiments with aluminium and indium arc sources. We have extracted 300 mA of pure Al at 30 kV for 10 .mu.s. The normalized beam emittance has been measured to be 8 x 10/sup /minus/7/ .pi.-m-rad. 3 refs., 5 figs.