An Automatic System for Ion Beam Characterization Using LabVIEW

Authors

Ranjini Menon, P Y Nabhiraj and R K Bhandari

Abstract

Ion beam processes are gaining vast popularity in different fields like material research, nanotechnology, surface studies, industrial applications etc. Characterization of ion beam extracted from the source is very important before using it for any process and this demands sophisticated equipments and methods. We have developed an automated, simple to use and easy to replicate system to find out the emittance, which is one of the features of the ion beam to determine its quality, of a low energy ion beam extracted from an inductively coupled plasma ion source. The emittance measurement technique involves the electrostatic deflection of ion beam and finding out the divergence angle of the charged particle from the deflection voltage applied. An application is written in LabVIEW 7.1 to control the equipments such as Compact Field point modules, Keithley Pico ammeter cum voltage sources, in-vacuum high resolution micro translation stages etc used in the experiment, acquire and store data, eliminate noise submerged in the data and to find out the accurate emittance. In this paper a brief of the experiment, capabilities and various features of the LabVIEW application, equipments and methods used for data acquisition and analysis are presented.