Investigation of ion capture in an electron beam ion trap charge-breeder for rare isotopes

Charge breeding of rare isotope ions has become an important ingredient for providing reaccelerated rare isotope beams for science. At the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory (NSCL), a reaccelerator, ReA, has been built that employs an advanced Electron Beam Ion Trap (EBIT) as a charge breeder. ReA will provide rare-isotope beams with energies of a few hundred keV/u up to tens of MeV/u to enable the study of properties of rare isotopes via low energy Coulomb excitation and transfer reactions, and to investigate nuclear reactions important for nuclear astrophysics. ReA consists of an EBIT charge breeder, a charge-over-mass selector, a room temperature radio-frequency quadrupole accelerator, and a superconducting radio-frequency linear accelerator. The EBIT charge breeder features a high-current electron gun, a long trap structure, and a hybrid superconducting magnet to reach both high acceptance for injected low-charge ions as well as high-electron beam current densities for fast charge breeding.;In this work, continuous ion injection and capture in the EBIT have been investigated with a dedicated Monte-Carlo simulation code and in experimental studies. The Monte-Carlo code NEBIT considers the electron-impact ionization cross sections, space charge due to the electron beam current, ion dynamics, electric field from electrodes, and magnetic field from the superconducting magnet. Experiments were performed to study the capture efficiency as a function of injected ion beam current, electron beam current, trap size, and trap potential depth. The charge state evolution of trapped ions was studied, providing information about the effective current density of the electron beam inside the EBIT. An attempt was made to measure the effective space-charge potential of the electron beam by studying the dynamics of a beam injected and reflected inside the trap.