Study of a liquid metal ion source for external ion injection into electron-beam ion source

A liquid metal ion source (LMIS) has several attractive features as an external injector of primary ions (mostly metallic ions) into electron-beam ion source (EBIS). It does not use a buffer gas and therefore it provides only a very small gas load to the system; its control and operation are simple, power consumption does not exceed 10W, and beam pulses are very stable. A gold-silicon LMIS was supplied by FEI Company (http://www.feibeamtech.com/pages/liquid.html) and tested in a pulsed regime with an ion pulse width of 2ms and frequency up to 5Hz. Total extracted ion current reached 50μA and the normalized emittance of the total ion beam was 0.05πmmmrad. The results of this test, as well as results of experiments in which this ion source is used for injection of Au ions into EBIS, are presented.