Picosecond ion pulses from an EN tandem created by a femtosecond Ti:sapphire laser

As the James R. Macdonald Laboratory at Kansas State University continues its transformation from an ion collisions facility to an ultrafast laser/ion collisions facility, we are looking for novel ways to combine our traditional accelerator expertise with our new laser capabilities. One such combination is to produce picosecond pulses of stripping gas ions in the high energy accelerating tube of our EN tandem by directing ∼100 fs, sub-milliJoule laser pulses up the high energy end of the tandem toward a focusing mirror at the terminal. Ion pulses from both stripping and residual gas have been produced and identified, with pulse widths thus far on the order of a nanosecond. This width represents an upper limit, as it is dominated by pulse-to-pulse jitter in the ion time-of-flight (TOF) and is therefore not a true representation of the actual pulse width. In this paper, we describe the development process and report on the results to date. Conditions limiting the minimum temporal pulse width, such as tandem terminal ripple, thermal motion of the gas and space charge effects, are also outlined.