Simple Template-Based Method to Produce Bradbury-Nielsen Gates

A Bradbury-Nielsen gate (BNG) consists of two interleaved and electrically isolated sets of wires and can transmit or deflect charged particles by applying a varying voltage difference across the two wire sets. We present a simple template-based method to fabricate BNGs with wire spacings as small as 50 μm with minimal use of a microscope. The small wire spacing allows modulation rates at tens of megahertz. Using this method, we have fabricated four BNGs with wire spacings of 500, 200, 100, and 50 μm using 10 μm gold-coated tungsten wires. The performance of the four BNGs is characterized using an imaging detector and compared with theoretical predictions.