Double Acceleration of Ions and Application in Biomaterials

Ions of different elements were generated by laser-induced-plasma and accelerated by a two adjacent cavities. Therefore, the ions undergo a double acceleration imparting a maximum ion energy of 160 keV per charge state. We analyzed the extracted charge from a Cu target as a function of the accelerating voltage. At 60 kV of total accelerating voltage, the maximum current peak was of 5.3 mA. The ion flux resulted of 3.4x1011 ions/cm2. The normalized emittance measured by pepper pot method at 60 kV was of 0.22 π mm mrad. By means of this machine, biomedical materials as UHMWPE were implanted with carbon and titanium ions. At a total ion flux of 2x1015 ions/cm2 the polyethylene surface increased its micro hardness of about 3-hold measured by the scratch test. Considering the ion emission cone dimension, we estimated a total extracted charge per pulse of 200 nC.