Previous studies on the liquid Gallium ion sources used an electro-chemically etched tungsten wire with a coil-type heater. Such a structure requires excessive power consumption in the course of heating the liquid metal. In this work. a new structure ...
Previous studies on the liquid Gallium ion sources used an electro-chemically etched tungsten wire with a coil-type heater. Such a structure requires excessive power consumption in the course of heating the liquid metal. In this work. a new structure is proposed that replaces the coil-type heater. It uses a Gallium reservoir made of six pre-etched 250 ㎛ tungsten wires that surround the needle electrode. Gallium loading at the reservoir is observed to be much more stable. resulting in an improved beam stability.