High Current Ion Source Development for Heavy Ion Fusion

We are developing high-current-density high-brightness sources for Heavy Ion Fusion applications. Heavy ion driven inertial fusion requires beams of high brightness in order to achieve high power density at the target for high target gain. At present, there are no existing ion source types that can readily meet all the driver HIF requirements, though sources exist which are adequate for present experiments and which with further development may achieve driver requirements. Our two major efforts have been on alumino-silicate sources and RF plasma sources. Experiments being performed on a 10-cm alumino-silicate source are described. To obtain a compact system for a HIF driver we are studying RF plasma sources where low current beamlets are combined to produce a high current beam. A 80-kV 20-{micro}s source has produced up to 5 mA of Ar{sup +} in a single beamlet. The extraction current density was 100 mA/cm{sup 2}. We present measurements of the extracted current density as a function of RF power and gas pressure, current density uniformity, emittance, and energy dispersion (due to charge exchange).