Local ion sources are a very important component of the LEBIT facility. They provide stable ion beams not only for system tuning and optimization, but also for experiments and calibration masses. LEBIT currently uses a commercial plasma ion source from Colutron, and a laser ablation ion source that was designed and built in house.

Above are photos of the Colutron plasma ion source. Inside of the boron nitride chamber is a tungsten filament (right). A hole in the bottom of the chamber is used to leak gas in the chamber and/or insert an oven containing some material to be ionized. The current is heated by passing a current through it. An anode plate secured by a cap (left) a few millimeters above the filament. If a gas is present in the chamber a discharge will occur and form a plasma. If the oven is used, the material inside will slowly vaporize and be ionized by the plasma.

The LAS provides ion beams that can't be produced with the plasma ion source, such as refractory elements or carbon clusters. The ion beam is produced by bombarding a rotating target with a pulsed 532 nm Nd:YAG laser beam. A small beam spot on target is achieved by using an optical telescope. The ions are accelerated through an extraction system and focused with an electrostatic quadrupole triplet, after which they are bent 90 degrees with an electrostatic quadrupole bender and injected into the ion beam cooler and buncher.

The plot below shows a distribution of carbon cluster ions produced with the laser ablation ion source and detected on a multichannel plate (MCP) detector.