Selective containment in EBIS for charge breeding applications

The production of radioactive ion beam (RIB) with the ISOL technique could require a charge breeder device to increase the ion acceleration efficiency and reduce greatly the production cost. The “charge breeder” is a device designed to accept radioactive 1+ ions in order to increase their charge state up to n+. In the framework of the SPES project, proposed at the INFN-LNL (Padua) for RIB production, an R&D experiment of a charge breeder device, BRIC, has been carried out at LNL. BRIC is an EBIS-type ion charge state breeder in which a radio frequency (RF) quadrupolar field has been superimposed in the trapped ion region to introduce a selective containment with the aim of increasing the ion trapping efficiency. In this paper, the device and the test measurements that demonstrate the selective containment effect due to the RF quadrupolar field are presented. Furthermore, some comments on the possibility of using that device as charge state breeder for RIB production has been also discussed in the conclusions. This experiment has been also considered as R&D program of the RIB European project EURISOL_DS.