Note: Fabrication of roughened tips for liquid metal ion sources

Dengshuai Guo; Xiaoming Kang; Jing Hu; Xinyu Liu; Weiguo He

doi:10.1063/1.4985635

Note: Fabrication of roughened tips for liquid metal ion sources

Rev Sci Instrum. 2017 Jun;88(6):066107. doi: 10.1063/1.4985635.

Authors

Dengshuai Guo¹, Xiaoming Kang¹, Jing Hu¹, Xinyu Liu¹, Weiguo He¹

Affiliation

¹ State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.

PMID: 28667975
DOI: 10.1063/1.4985635

Abstract

In a liquid metal ion source (LMIS), the radius and the surface texture of the LMIS needle tip are demonstrated to have great effect on the I-V characteristics and the threshold voltages. In this paper, the dependence of the AC electrochemical etching parameters on the radius and the surface texture of the needle tip is investigated experimentally. A new method for fabricating the needle tip with the designed radius and texture for the LMIS is proposed. In this method, the roughening of a needle tip consists of two processes: a short time high AC voltage etching process and a long time low AC voltage etching process. The performances of the presented method are validated by a number of experiments.