Further development of the E-MEVVA ion source

We report detailed investigations of the electron-beam metal vapor vacuum-arc (E-MEVVA) ion source, which were performed jointly among the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, Moscow, Russia, the High Current Electronics Institute, Tomsk, Russia, and Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA. The experiments were performed in Moscow and Tomsk with nearly the same design of ion sources. Recently, the first successful ion charge states enhancement for this kind of ion source was demonstrated. This article presents comparisons of electron-beam effects and examines their influence on E-MEVVA performance. Substantial enhancement of high ion charge states enhancement was observed clearly in both experimental setups with two different methods of measuring the ion charge state distributions. These results can be considered as a proof of the E-MEVVA principle. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.