Conceptual design of a permanent ring magnet based helicon plasma source module intended to be used in a large size fusion grade ion source

A conceptual design of a permanent magnet based single driver helicon plasma source module along with its design approach is described in this paper. The module unit is intended to be used in a large size ion source. The conceptual design of the helicon source module has been carried out using a computer code, HELIC. The magnetic field topology for the ring magnet is simulated with another code, BFieldM and the magnetic field values obtained from the calculation are further used as input in HELIC calculation for the conceptual design. The module is conceptualized based on a cylindrical glass vessel to produce plasma of diameter ∼50 mm, height ∼50 mm. The inner diameter of the permanent ring magnets is also of the same dimension with thickness ∼10 mm each, placed slightly above the backplate to maintain the required magnetic field. The simulated results show that for hydrogen gas, expected plasma density can be achieved as high as ∼1012–1013 cm−3 in the proposed helicon source configuration using 1 kW 13.56 MHz RF generator. An experimental setup to characterize a Helicon source module unit, consisting of a cylindrical glass (plasma) chamber along with the vacuum system, RF power supplies, probes and data acquisition system is being installed.