Surface resistivity tailoring of ceramic insulators for an ion microprobe application

An important technique used for the grading of voltage drop along high voltage ceramic insulators is to provide some surface conduction to bleed off accumulated surface charge. We have used metal ion implantation to modify the surface of high voltage ceramic vacuum insulators to provide a uniform surface resistivity of order 10 Ω/square. A vacuum arc ion source based implanter was used to implant Pt at an energy of about 125 keV to a dose of order 10 ions/cm into the surface of ceramic rods used to support the ion focusing system of the Columbia University high voltage ion microprobe. Here we describe the experimental set-up used to do the ion implantation and summarize the results of our exploratory work on implantation into test coupons and into the ceramic rods. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.