Recent negative ion source activity at JYFL

A filament-powered multicusp ion source for production of H⁻ has been developed for the Jyväskylä Pelletron accelerator for use in ion beam lithography and particle induced X-ray emission applications. The source can be considered conventional with the exception of the filter field being created with an electric magnet for continuous adjustability. A permanent magnet dipoleantidipole electron dump is integrated in the puller electrode. The source provides 50 μA H⁻ beam at 10 keV energy with 0.019 mm mrad 95 % normalized rms emittance through a 2 mm aperture. Lower emittance is achievable by changing the plasma electrode insert to a smaller aperture one if application requires. A new commercial MCC30/15 cyclotron has been installed at the Jyväskylä accelerator laboratory providing 30MeV H⁺ and 15Mev D⁺ for use in nuclear physics experiments and applications. The ion source delivered with the cyclotron is a a filament-powered multicusp source capable of about 130 h continuous operation at 1 mA H⁻ output between filament changes. The ion source is located in the cyclotron vault and therefore a significant waiting time for the vault cooldown is required before filament change is possible. This kind of operation is not acceptable as 350 h and longer experiments are expected. Therefore a project for developing a CW 13.56 MHz RF ion source has been initiated. A planar RF antenna replacing the filament back plate of the existing TRIUMF-type ion source has been used in the first tests with 240 μA of H⁻ and 21 mA of electrons measured at 1.5 kW of RF power. Tests with higher RF power levels were prevented by electron beam induced sparking. A new plasma chamber has been built and a new extraction is being designed for the RF ion source. The extraction code IBSimu has recently gone through a major update on how smooth electrode surfaces are implemented in the Poisson solvers. This has made it possible to implement a fast multigrid solver with low memory consumption. Also a method has been made to import 3D CAD geometries into simulations.