Evaluation of a novel design for an electrostatic quadrupole triplet ion beam lens

We describe the design and evaluation of an electrostatic quadrupole triplet lens constructed to focus ion beams of up to 200 keV in energy. The lens is very compact and incorporates a feature to induce octupole fields that can correct for spherical and other octupole-order aberrations. Two methods were used to evaluate the lens: observation of the focused beam spot on a specially fabricated target while systematically varying lens voltages, and the grid-shadow technique. The latter demonstrated that octupole-order aberrations were completely corrected in one direction when the lens quadrupoles were operated individually and excited to produce an appropriate octupole component of the electric field.