Production of highly charged heavy ions by 18 GHz superconducting electron cyclotron resonance at Research Center for Nuclear Physics.

An 18 GHz superconducting electron cyclotron resonance ion source has been installed as a subject of the azimuthally varying field cyclotron upgrade project (K. Hatanaka et al., in Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cyclotrons and Their Applications, Tokyo, Japan, 18-22 October 2004, pp. 115-117), in order to increase beam currents and to extend the variety of ions. The production development of several ions has been performed since 2006 and some of them have already been used for user experiments [T. Yorita et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 79, 02A311 (2008)]. Further optimizations for each component such as the material of plasma electrode, material, and shape of bias probe and mirror field have been continued and more intense ion beams have been obtained for O, N, and Ar. For the purpose of obtaining highly charged Xe with several microamperes, the optimization of position and shape of plasma electrode and bias disk has also been done and highly charged Xe(32+) beam has been obtained successfully.