Because plasma production at vacuum cathode spots is approximately proportional to the arc current, arc current modulation can be used to generate ion current modulation that can be detected far from the spot using a negatively biased ion collector. The drift time to the ion detector can used to determine kinetic ion energies. A very wide range of cathode materials have been used. It has been found that the kinetic ion energy is higher at the beginning of each discharge and approximately constant after 150 μs. The kinetic energy is correlated with the arc voltage and the cohesive energy of the cathode material. The ion erosion rate is in inverse relation to the cohesive energy, enhancing the effect that the power input per plasma particle correlates with the cohesive energy of the cathode material. The influence of three magnetic field configurations on the kinetic energy has been investigated. Generally, a magnetic field increases the plasma impedance, arc burning voltage, and kinetic ion energy. However, if the plasma is produced in a region of low field strength and streaming into a region of higher field strength, the velocity may decrease due to the magnetic mirror effect. A magnetic field can increase the plasma temperature but may reduce the density gradients by preventing free expansion into the vacuum. Therefore, depending on the configuration, a magnetic field may increase or decrease the kinetic energy of ions.

Ion velocities in vacuum arc plasmas have been measured for most conducting elements of the Periodic Table. The method is based on drift time measurements via the delay time between arc current modulation and ion flux modulation. A correlation has been found between the element-specific ion velocity and average ion charge state; however, differently charged ions of the same element have approximately the same velocity. These findings contradict the potential hump model but are in agreement with a gasdynamic model that describes ion acceleration as driven by pressure gradients and electron-ion friction. The differences between elements can be explained by the element-specific power density of the cathode spot plasma which in turn determines the temperature, average charge state, and ion velocity of the expanding vacuum arc plasma.

The ion current from different cathode materials was measured for 50-500 A of arc current. The ion current normalized by the arc current was found to depend on the cathode material, with values in the range from 5% to 19%. The normalized ion current was generally greater for elements of low cohesive energy. The ion erosion rates were determined from values of ion current and ion charge states, which were previously measured in the same ion source. The absolute ion erosion rates ranged from 16-173 /spl mu/g/C.

Repetitive pulses of voltage and current are applied in high-power impulse magnetron sputtering. The current pulse usually lags the applied voltage by a significant time, which, in some cases, can reach several tens of microseconds. The current time lag is generally highly reproducible and jitters less than 1% of the delay time. This work investigates the time lag experimentally and theoretically. The experiments include several different target and gas combinations, voltage and current amplitudes, gas pressures, pulse repetition rates, and pulse durations. It is shown that, in all cases, the inverse delay is approximately proportional to the applied voltage, where the proportionality factor depends on the combination of materials and the conditions selected. The proportionality factor contains the parameters of ionization and secondary-electron emission. The statistical time lag is negligible, while the formative time lag is large and usually dominated by ion motion (inertia), although, at a low pressure, the long free path of magnetized electrons causing ionization contributes to the delay.

Vacuum arc ion sources have been made and used by a large number of research groups around the world over the past twenty years. The first generation of vacuum arc ion sources (dubbed “Mevva,” for metal vapor vacuum arc) was developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1980s. This paper considers the design, performance parameters, and some applications of a new modified version of this kind of source which we have called Mevva-V.Ru. The source produces broad beams of metal ions at an extraction voltage of up to 60 kV and a time-averaged ion beam current in the milliampere range. Here, we describe the Mevva-V.Ru vacuum arc ion source that we have developed at Tomsk and summarize its beam characteristics along with some of the applications to which we have put it. We also describe the source performance using compound cathodes.

We describe the design, electronics, and test results of a simple and low-cost time-of-flight ion charge-to-mass analyzer that is suitable for ion source characterization. The method selects a short-time sample of the beam whose charge-to-mass composition is then separated according to ion velocity and detected by a remote Faraday cup. The analyzer is a detachable device that has been used for rapid analysis of charge-to-mass composition of ion beams accelerated by voltages of up to about $100\mathrm{kV}$ .