Ion guiding in curved glass capillaries

Straight and curved glass capillaries were tested for the guiding of 8 keV Ar8+ ion beams. The straight capillary was about 50 mm long and 0.87 mm/1.1 mm in inner/outer diameter. One of the two curved capillaries was similar, but was curved with a 270 mm radius. The other was 53 mm long, had diameters of 2.34 mm/2.99 mm, and was curved with a 150 mm radius. The corresponding bending angles of the two curved capillaries were 9.6° and 17.5°, respectively. Transmission through the straight capillary disappeared when the tilt angle was larger than 5°. The curved capillaries guided the ion beams into their corresponding bending angles, which were much larger than 5°, with transmission efficiencies of a few tens percent. This demonstrates the possibility of developing a new scheme of simple small beam deflectors and related beam optics.