Development of a dc, broad beam, Mevva ion source

We are developing an embodiment of metal vapor vacuum arc (Mevva) ion source which will operate dc and have a very large area beam. In preliminary testing, a dc titanium ion beam was formed with a current of approximately 0.6 A at an extraction voltage of 9 kV (about 18 keV ion energy, by virtue of the ion-charge state distribution) using an 18-cm-diameter set of multiaperture extraction grids. Separately, we have tested and formed a beam from a 50-cm-diameter (2000 cm2) set of grids using a pulsed plasma gun. This configuration appears to be very efficient in terms of plasma utilization, and we have formed beams with a diameter of 33 cm (FWHM) and ion current up to 7 A at an extraction voltage of 50 kV (about 100 keV mean ion energy) and up to 20 A peak at the current overshoot part of the beam pulse. Here we describe this part of our Mevva development program and summarize the results obtained to date.