Intense Highly Charged Heavy Ion Beam Production

With the increase in applications of heavy ions in various fields, the production of intense beams of highly charged heavy ions from ion sources become more and more important. For example, the ion sources are required to produce intense dc beams of highly charged heavy ions for accelerator facilities for radioisotope beam production, and intense short-pulsed beams for injection into synchrotrons. Additionally, in these applications, the ion sources face several important characteristics that need to be improved to meet these requirements, such as source lifetime, reliability, current stability, and beam emittance. Thus, several high-performance ion sources (including ECR, electron-beam, and laser ion sources), for production of the intense beams (dc and pulsed) of highly charged heavy ions, have been constructed and achieved remarkable breakthrough in the past decade. In this contribution, state-of-the-art ion sources for production of intense highly charged heavy ion beams is reviewed. Future perspective is also discussed.