Improvement of the yield of highly charged ions by a gas-pulsing technique and the current status of the NIRS Penning source

The yields of highly charged ions have been improved by using a gas-pulsing technique in the pulsed Penning-ionized-gauge ion source (PIGIS) in the heavy-ion medical accelerator in Chiba. So far, this pulsed PIGIS has been operated under a low-duty factor (10-2-10-3), in which the gas flow is not being pulsed. A solenoid-type gas valve, having a simple structure compared to the piezo-electric type, was attached to the outside of the PIGIS chamber in order to control the gas flow into the PIGIS chimney. Beam tests for Ne with gas pulsing showed that the pressure response time should actually be a few tens ms, and the intensity of Ne6+ was increased by ten times, from 20 to 200 eμA. The gas pulsing also improved the average vacuum in the low energy beam transport (LEBT) line by a factor of 4. When producing H2+, H3+, and He1+ by PIGIS with gas pulsing, the beam loss of highly charged ions from electron cyclotron resonance ion sources in the LEBT was reduced to be negligible; meanwhile, it was around 30% without gas pulsing. This paper describes the gas-pulsing technique and the preliminary results, as well as some recent developments in the NIRS-PIGIS