To qualify electron cyclotron resonance charge breeders, the method that is traditionally used to evaluate the charge breeding time consists in generating a rising edge of the injected beam current and measuring the time in which the extracted multicharged ion beam reaches 90% of its final current. It is demonstrated in the present paper that charge breeding times can be more accurately measured by injecting short pulses of $1+\mathrm{ions}$ and recording the time resolved responses of $\mathrm{N}+$ ions. This method is used to probe the effect of the $1+\mathrm{ion}$ accumulation in the plasma known to disturb the buffer gas plasma equilibrium and is a step further in understanding the large discrepancies reported in charge breeding times. The experiments are conducted injecting a ${}^{85}{\mathrm{Rb}}^{+}$ ion beam into the Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie (LPSC) charge breeder operated with helium as a buffer gas. The time needed for the extraction of 90% of the multicharged ions in short pulse mode is found slightly shorter (9%) than the charge breeding time measured with the traditional method. The charge breeding efficiency is identical with both methods. The pulse width and amplitude of the $1+$ injection pulses have been varied to study their influence on the $\mathrm{N}+$ response and temporal parameters are proposed to qualify the time response. The short pulse method can be used to study the influence of the ion source tuning parameters on the charge breeding temporal characteristics. For example, it is shown here that an increase of the minimum magnetic field strength of the LPSC charge breeder in the range 0.432–0.444 T improves the multicharged ion confinement in the electron cyclotron resonance plasma, and so increases the charge breeding efficiency. The short pulse method is also used to estimate the charge breeding efficiencies of radioactive Rb isotopes taking into account their half-lives and charge states. The neutron-rich heavy isotopes have short half-lives, which makes the charge state distributions shift to lower charge states and the estimated charge breeding efficiencies of high charge states being close to three times less in comparison to the stable ions.

• Received 19 July 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.21.104801

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Published by the American Physical Society