Ion acceleration by a re1ativistic electron beam

Theoretical and experimental studies of the formation of a dense cloud of relativistic electrons at injection of the relativistic electron beam (REB) with a supercritical current into vacuum have been carried out in the work of Arzhannikov et al. (1976). It has been pointed out that such a cloud of relativistic electrons produced in a plasma layer, may be used for collective ion acceleration . Under the influence of the field of oscillating relativistic electrons the ions are extracted out of the plasma and accelerated to a high energy. In this paper, the authors report the first experimental results on the ion acceleration in this way at the KRAB device.