A channel for modification of materials with post-accelerated or deceleratedmultiply charged ion beams

摘要

At present, heavy ion beams from the electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion source in the Laboratory ofPhysics of the Vincˇa Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Belgrade, Serbia, are employed in a channel for surfacemodification of materials. The source and channel were commissioned in 1998, and have been usedsince that time by a number of user groups from the Vincˇa Institute and other scientific and educationalinstitutions in Serbia. However, since the maximum extraction voltage of the source is +25 kV,sometimes the extracted beams do not have sufficiently high energies for such applications. Therefore,in order to solve this problem, we have decided to construct a new channel, to be used for deepermodification of materials. The beams obtained from the source will be post-accelerated by biasing thetarget to be irradiated to the negative potentials of down to 100 kV. For example, we shall be able tobombard the target with the 132Xe24+ beam of the energy of up to 3 MeV, instead of up to 600 keV, in thecase without the biasing system. An additional possibility will be to bias the target to the positivepotentials of up to +25 kV and thus decelerate the beams extracted from the source down to theenergies of about 1 keV. Consequently, one will be able to modify materials with the beams in a wideenergy range, from 1 to 3MeV, which is rarely met at similar experimental set-ups. It must be notedthat changing the post-accelerated or decelerated beam energy in the new channel will be performedsimply by adjusting the power supply of the biasing system, without any adjustments of the source andof the transport elements between the source and the interaction chamber.