Development of a pepper pot emittance probe and its application for ECR ion beam studies

A pepper pot–scintillator screen system has been developed and used to measure the emittance of DC ion beams extracted from a high-intensity permanent magnet ECR ion source. The system includes a fast beam shutter with a minimum dwell time of 18 ms to reduce the degradation of the CsI(Tl) scintillator by DC ion beam irradiation and a CCD camera with a variable shutter speed in the range of 1 μs–65 s. On-line emittance measurements are performed by an application code developed on a LabVIEW platform. The sensitivity of the device is sufficient to measure the emittance of DC ion beams with current densities down to about 100 nA/cm2. The emittance of all ion species extracted from the ECR ion source and post-accelerated to an energy of 75–90 keV/charge have been measured downstream of the LEBT. As the mass-to-charge ratio of ion species increases, the normalized RMS emittances in both transverse phase planes decrease from 0.5–1.0 π mm mrad for light ions to 0.05–0.09 π mm mrad for highly charged 209Bi ions. The dependence of the emittance on ionʹs mass-to-charge ratio follows very well the dependence expected from beam rotation induced by decreasing ECR axial magnetic field. The measured emittance values cannot be explained by only ion beam rotation for all ion species and the contribution to emittance of ion temperature in plasma, non-linear electric fields and non-linear space charge is comparable or even higher than the contribution of ion beam rotation.