Small Dot Printing with Ion Head

摘要

A novel solution is proposed and tested for the blooming problem present when generating latent images on a dielectric with an Ion head. Blooming refers to the increase in the latent image diameter as charges accumulate on the dielectric imaging substrate typically used for lonography. The proposed solution consists on operating the Ion Head at pressures higher than atmospheric to enable large extraction fields without arcing. A pressurized chamber is built to demonstrate that higher pressure operation (2-3 atm) indeed allows extraction fields up to 12 V/μm. These large extraction fields (9-12 V/μm) allow to maintain the charge beam focused, enabling small dot (～40 um) latent images. A liquid toner based development process is implemented combined with a 6.35 μm Mylar dielectric to generate small dot images and contrast them with those obtained when the extraction field is limited by arcing at atmospheric pressure.