Development of Zn and Eu beams by plasma sputtering

Accelerated ion beams of various species are important tools to engineer the materials. The low energy ion beam facility (LEIBF) at Nuclear Science Centre (NSC) provides the ion beams of energy in the range of a few keV to a few MeV. The LEIBF is fully operational since 2001 and its performance has been tested very well with ion beams from noble gases. Metallic and rare earth ion beams have important role in the field of nano-technology and enhancement of optical properties of semiconducting nano-particles inside various matrices. During the last few years, an effort was made to extract ion beams of various metal and rare earth elements using different techniques. Here we describe the successful development of Zn and Eu ion beams using sputtering technique in electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion source. Operational experience to produce such kind of beams and results on beam analysis are described in the paper.