Carbon beam extraction with 14.5 GHz electron cyclotron resonance ion source at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institutea)

A 14.5 GHz Electron Cyclotron Resonance ion source (ECRIS) has been made to produce C4+ beam for using a carbon therapy facility and recently tested at KAERI. Highly charged carbon ions have been successfully extracted. When using only CO2 gas, the beam current of C4+ was almost 14 μA at 15 kV extraction voltage. To get higher current of the C4+ beam, while optimizing confinement magnetic field configuration (e.g., axial strengths at minimum and extraction side), gas-mixing (CO2/He), and biased disk were introduced. When the gas mixing ratio of the CO2/He gas is 1:8 at an operational pressure of 5 × 10−7 mbar and the disk was biased to −150 V relative to the ion source body, the highest current of the C4+ beam was achieved to be 50 μA, more than three times higher than previously observed only with CO2 gas. Some details on the operating conditions of the ECRIS were discussed.