Study of a liquid metal ion source for external ion injection into electron-beam ion source

A liquid metal ion source (LMIS) has several attractive features as an external injector of primary ions (mostly metallic ions) into electron-beam ion source (EBIS). It does not use a buffer gas and therefore it provides only a very small gas load to the system; its control and operation are simple, power consumption does not exceed 10 W, and beam pulses are very stable. A gold-silicon LMIS was supplied by FEI Company (http://www.feibeamtech.com/pages/liquid.html) and tested in a pulsed regime with an ion pulse width of 2 ms and frequency up to 5 Hz. Total extracted ion current reached 50 μA and the normalized emittance of the total ion beam was 0.05π mm mrad. The results of this test, as well as results of experiments in which this ion source is used for injection of Au ions into EBIS, are presented