Production of a microbeam of slow highly charged ions with a tapered glass capillary

Abstract

The authors have developed a method to produce a microbeam of slow highly charged ions based on a self-organized charge-up inside a tapered glass capillary. A transmission of 8 keV Ar8+ beam through the capillary 5 cm long with 80024 μm inlet/outlet inner diameters was observed stably for more than 1200 s. The transmitted beam had the same size as the outlet with a beam density enhancement of approximately 10 and a divergence of ±5 mrad. The initial beam was guided through a capillary tilted by as large as ±100 mrad, and it still kept the incident charge. © 2006 American Institute of Physics.