Hello,
Very interesting website on a very interesting subject. I'm going to have a crack at making a small machine.
I'm a mechanical design engineer working in particle physics (former CERN employee), specializing at the moment in ion source design (Penning H- sources) so am in the lucky position to have vacuum and high voltage equipment at my disposal.
I'm sure I'll have lots of very simple questions over the coming months, so I look forward to talking to some of you.
Cheers
Theo
Hello from a physics lab in the UK
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- Dennis P Brown
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Re: Hello from a physics lab in the UK
And I am sure many here would very much be interested on your insight relative to Penning Ion guns both those fashioned here and more professional ones; especially any comments on increasing performance (i.e. more current output for a given power ... .)
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Re: Hello from a physics lab in the UK
Hi Dennis,
We find that the achievable beam current (both the useful H- and the unwanted co-extracted electrons) is very closely related to the volume of the plasma being generated. Therefore currently we are developing a source with a much larger plasma volume than we have traditionally been using.
At the end of this month, I am off to the US to present on this new design. Once this is done and the information is in the public domain, I will post more about it on here.
Due to the extremely compact size and very high densities achievable, a Penning H- driven accelerator is also the only type of accelerator that has ever been in space. In the late 80s the US very briefly (a matter of minutes) a neutral beam (H0) accelerator in space as a component of SDI. It was called BEAR (beam experiments aboard a rocket) and was precisely as mad as it sounds.
We find that the achievable beam current (both the useful H- and the unwanted co-extracted electrons) is very closely related to the volume of the plasma being generated. Therefore currently we are developing a source with a much larger plasma volume than we have traditionally been using.
At the end of this month, I am off to the US to present on this new design. Once this is done and the information is in the public domain, I will post more about it on here.
Due to the extremely compact size and very high densities achievable, a Penning H- driven accelerator is also the only type of accelerator that has ever been in space. In the late 80s the US very briefly (a matter of minutes) a neutral beam (H0) accelerator in space as a component of SDI. It was called BEAR (beam experiments aboard a rocket) and was precisely as mad as it sounds.