Observation of a high-energy tail in ion energy distribution in the cylindrical Hall thruster plasma

Abstract

A novel method is presented to determine populations and ion energy distribution functions (IEDFs) of individual ion species having different charge states in an ion beam from the measured spectrum of an E × B probe. The inversion of the problem is performed by adopting the iterative Tikhonov regularization method with the characteristic matrices obtained from the calculated ion trajectories. In a cylindrical Hall thruster plasma, an excellent agreement is observed between the IEDFs by an E × B probe and those by a retarding potential analyzer. The existence of a high-energy tail in the IEDF is found to be mainly due to singly charged Xe ions, and is interpreted in terms of non-linear ion acceleration.