Emittance dependence on anode morphology of an ion beam provided by laser ablation

•We studied the characteristics of ion beams generated by laser ablation.•We varied the geometric configuration of the extracting electrode.•The emittance evaluation was performed by the pepper pot method utilizing radio-chromic films.

In this work, we studied the characteristics of ion beams generated by Platone accelerator in different anode configurations. The accelerator is a laser ion source with two gaps which accelerate the ions in cascade. The laser is a ns pulsed KrF able to apply irradiances of 109–1010 W/cm2. The target ablated was pure disk of Cu. The accelerating voltage applied in this work was 60 kV. The emittance evaluation was performed by the pepper pot method utilizing radio-chromic films, EBT Gafchromic, as sensible targets. The study was performed by varying the geometric configuration of the anode (the extracting electrode), modifying the hole morphology, e.g. a plane and curved grid were mounted in order to change the extraction configuration. The results were compared with the ones obtained with the extraction hole without any grid. For the normalized emittance the lowest value was 0.20π mm mrad.