Recent progresses at LBNL in developing ion beams for industry, radiation therapy and inertial fusion applications were discussed. The highlights include ion beam lithography, boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT), and heavy ion fusion (HIF) drivers using multiple linacs.

A miniature multiple beamlet approach to an injector system was recently proposed in order to reduce the size, cost, and power requirements of the injector. The beamlets of very high current density are needed to meet the brightness requirement. Besides vacuum arc ion sources, cold-cathode gas ion sources are candidates for this application. Vacuum-arc metal ion sources and vacuum-arc-like gas ion sources are discussed. Experiments are presented that focus on the short-pulse plasma composition and ion charge state distribution. Mg and Sr have been identified as the most promising metals leading to mono-species beams when 20 mu s arc pulses are used. It is shown that the efficient production of gas ions requires the presence of a magnetic field.

At the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) a diagnostic neutral beam injection system for measuring plasma parameters, flow velocity, and local magnetic field is being developed. High proton fraction and small divergence is essential for diagnostic neutral beams. In our design, a neutral hydrogen beam with an 8 cm x 11 cm (or smaller) elliptical beam spot at 2.5 m from the end of the extraction column is produced. The beam will deliver up to 5 A of hydrogen beam to the target with a pulse width of ~;1 s, once every 1 - 2 min. The H1+ ion species of the hydrogen beam will be over 90 percent. For this application, we have compared two types of RF driven multicusp ion sources operating at 13.56 MHz. The first one is an ion source with an external spiral antenna behind a dielectric RF-window. The second one uses an internal antenna in similar ion source geometry. The source needs to generate uniform plasma over a large (8 cm x 5 cm) extraction area. We expect that the ion source with internal antenna will be more efficient at producing the desired plasma density but might have the issue of limited antenna lifetime, depending on the duty factor. For both approaches there is a need for extra shielding to protect the dielectric materials from the back streaming electrons. The source walls will be made of insulator material such as quartz that has been observed to generate plasma with higher atomic fraction than sources with metal walls. The ion beam will be extracted and accelerated by a set of grids with slits, thus forming an array of 6 sheet-shaped beamlets. The multiple grid extraction will be optimized using computer simulation programs. Neutralization of the beam will be done in neutralization chamber, which has over 70 percent neutralization efficiency.