Issues in the understanding of negative ion extraction for fusion

A number of recent papers have been devoted to the modeling of negative ion extraction using particle simulations but the published results are not entirely satisfactory and not fully consistent with experiments. Issues raised by the simulations concern the saturation of the negative ion current emitted from the caesiated plasma grid surface, its distribution along the surface, the shape of the meniscus formed around each grid aperture, the distribution and depth of the potential in the virtual cathode, and the profile of the extracted beamlet. These are important issues since they have direct impact on the properties of the extracted negative ion beam (intensity, brightness, aberration). In this paper we first summarize recently published model results that are unexpected and counter-intuitive since they predict that negative ions are extracted from regions of the grid that are directly exposed to the large extraction voltage (i.e. as in vacuum and without the need for a neutralizing background plasma). We then illustrate, with results from two-dimensional particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision simulations, some regimes of negative ion extraction that are more consistent with the expected physics.