Multi-kiloampere, electron-beam generation from bare aluminum photo-cathodes driven by an ArF laser

An electron-beam-pumped laser operating at ArF (193 nm) producing up to 5.0 joules in a 150-ns pulse has been used to illuminate micro-machined aluminum cathodes. The cathode was pulsed from 2.25- up to 2.95-MV across a 20-cm-AK gap producing fields up to 145 kV/cm using REX (a 4-MeV, 5-kA, 100-ns pulsed diode). Extracted current versus laser power gives a quantum efficiency increasing with power density from 0.07 to 0.11%. The present work is significant in that the cathode operates in the presence of out-gassing materials with a background vacuum pressure in the mid 10-6 torr region and 100-ns-long electron beams of up to 3 kA have been produced. Both emission limited (current follows laser pulse) and space-charge-limited (current follows pulsed power) regimes have been studied up to ∼ 50 A/cm2 by varying the cathode diameter. The beam temperature has been measured to be < 5 eV and directly compared in the same experimental setup to velvet based cathodes that measure ∼ 100 eV