Development of a compact high current low emittance RF ion source

Highlights: • An ICP ion source with modified plasma chamber is investigated for its performance. • Increased extracted current is observed with small size of plasma volume. • 2 mA of ion beam extracted from hydrogen plasma at 300 W of RF power. • Measured minimum normalized rms emittance for Ar beam is 0.0075 mm mrad. -- Abstract: A 13.56 MHz inductively coupled plasma based RF ion source is developed for production of high brightness focused ion beams of heavy gaseous elements for high speed milling and light ions for high speed imaging. In order to obtain ion beams with low emittance, no magnetic field of any kind is used in the ion source. However, to achieve the high plasma density, the plasma chamber volume is reduced to couple RF power as high as 8–12 W/cm3 to the plasma. Measurements show that the normalized rms emittance of 0.6 mA Ar1+ beam to be as low as 0.0075 mm-mrad while it is 0.004 mm-mrad for 1.2 mA of ion beam from hydrogen plasma. With a simple parallel plate extraction system with an aperture of 2 mm diameter, 80 mA/cm2 of ion beam from hydrogen plasma could be extracted at 3.5 kV extraction potential and 300 W of RF power. The ion source has been operated with other heavy gases and results show that more than 1 mA of xenon and krypton ion beam could easily be extracted at 5 kV extraction potential and 200 W of RF power. In this article, the capability of the ion source to produce high current, low emittance heavy as well as light ion beams is presented