Defined emission area and custom thermal electron sources

The authors report on electron emission defining and stability techniques use for specialized thermionic cathodes. Primarily lanthanum hexaboride and cerium hexaboride have been used for cathode materials but we also use hafnium carbide for cases where background atmospheres preclude the use of hexaborides. A common form of emission suppression is to embed an oriented single crystal in graphite to suppress side emission and to help shape the electric field. Single planar discs 50 μm in diameter have been tested for use as high brightness, stable, and long life thermal sources. Line sources have also been developed with linewidth/lengths to 10/500 μm. Emission tests performed have shown that long-term drift and short-term instabilities can originate from boride and carbon interactions respectively. Improved mounting techniques are shown to yield emission with short-term beam current stability <0.05%.