Emittance characterization of ion beams provided by PLATONE accelerator

Abstract

Laser ion sources offer the possibility to have ion beams that can be useful as injector for particle accelerators. In this work, we studied the geometric quality of ion beams produced by the PLATONE accelerator. It is a LIS source and an electrostatic accelerator. It consists of ns pulsed KrF laser which works at the intensity of 108-1010 W/cm2 and a vacuum chamber where the ions are extracted from the plasma plume and accelerate by a double gap accelerating system. The accelerating voltage applied in DC mode was 60 kV. The beam characterization was performed by the Pepper Pot method with the use of radio-chromic films as sensible target. The measurements were performed by varying the geometric configuration of the anode (the extracting electrode) for the accelerating system. The lowest value found for the normalized emittance was 0.20 mm mrad.