Abstract
The plasma instabilities play an important role in an electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion source for the production of intense heavy ion beams in high charge states for particle accelerators. The geometrical and operational constraints of ECR sources hinder the trapping of ions for a sufficient time to get fully ionized with maximum efficiency. This problem is looked at in detail by studying the plasma instabilities in ECR ion sources. The ECR environment is full of complex rearrangements of various electric and magnetic fields to define a sustainable trap for the ions. The maximum frequency of plasma instability has been observed to be of 122.5 kHz under a set of sustainable plasma parameters. However, this limit may be pushed further if the plasma is overdriven in terms of source parameters. The instabilities cover a full regime of few tens of Hz to few hundreds of kHz under various operating conditions of radio frequency (rf), negative bias voltage, rf power and injection gas pressure. The rigorous details of frequencies and amplitudes of plasma instabilities are being reported by studying the Fourier spectrum of extracted and analyzed beam intensity. The plasma instabilities are attributed as drift waves in an inhomogeneous ECR plasma generated by the application of radio-frequency fields.
1 More- Received 12 March 2018
- Corrected 16 October 2018
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.21.093402
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
16 October 2018
Correction: The numerical entries in the first row of Table II have been adjusted to correlate with values in Fig. 4. A typographical error in the inline equation appearing in the first sentence after Eq. (5) has been corrected.