Design of a compact Faraday cup for low energy, low intensity ion beams

Beam intensity is one of the key parameters in particle accelerators, in particular during machine commissioning, but also during operation for experiments. At low beam energies and low intensities a number of challenges arise in its measurement as commonly used non-invasive devices are no longer sensitive enough. It then becomes necessary to stop the beam in order to measure its absolute intensity. A very compact Faraday cup for determining ion beam currents from a few nanoamperes down to picoamperes for the HIE-ISOLDE post-accelerator at CERN has been designed, built and tested with beam. It has a large aperture diameter of 30 mm and a total length of only 16 mm, making it one of the most compact designs ever used.In this paper we present the different steps that were involved in the design and optimization of this device, including beam tests with two early prototypes and the final monitor. We also present an analysis of the losses caused by secondary particle emission for different repelling electrode voltages and beam energies. Finally, we show that results obtained from an analytical model for electron loss probability combined with Monte Carlo simulations of particles trajectories provide a very good agreement with experimental data.