Influence of electron injection on electron cyclotron resonance plasma properties and reflected mode electrons (abstract)

Abstract

The injection of an additional strong focused electron beam from a special designed electron gun into a magnetic electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) confinement field is studied. The electron gun uses a cathode with a long lifetime and resistiveness providing high emission current densities with electron currents up to 50 mA and voltages up to 4 keV. A sequence of aluminum foils is used to investigate the trajectories of the electrons in the magnetic field without plasma. The high density electron beam passes through the foils, welds them, and prints its image into the foils. Details of this technique are described in Ref. 1. Using this technique we see that before the electrons enter the sextupole region the beam moves along the magnetic straight lines preserving its structure. Only a central beam passes through the sextupole region, thereby changing its form due to the interaction with radial components of the magnetic field. A new operation method at our 14.5 GHz ECR ion source is based on so-called reflection mode electrons (RMEs) analogous to a known electron beam ion source operation regime.2 The basic idea is that electrons, which traveling from the cathode in a strong axial field, meet an anticathode potential, are reflected from it, move back to the cathode, and will be reflected again and so on. It can be supposed that the electrons will make reflections up to the moment when the anode aperture of the gun is fulfilled and the electrons will be collected on the anode electrode. Investigations are performed extracting nitrogen ions using the RME beam. As a result we got a clear increase in the beam current of the extracted ions (e.g., at 10 mA electron injection an increase of the current of N5+ ions up to 400%) and a shift of the measured ion charge state distribution to higher mean ionization stages. Measured x-ray spectra from a neon loaded plasma show for the case of RME operation increasing energy shifts to the high energy side of the spectra, i.e., the mean ionization degree of the ions in the plasma increases. They also increase the intensity of the neon K x rays (more than 100% increase for RME injection of Ee=4 keV and Ie=10 mA) indicating that for the same operation parameters the mean density of energetic electrons rises at RME injection, i.e., there are more electrons with energies high enough to ionize K-shell electrons in neon.