Suppression of carbon buildup and lifetime improvement by heating carbon stripper foils

We have successfully developed a new method to reduce the amount of carbon buildup on thin cluster (less than 3.5 mu g/cm(2)) carbon stripper foils by heating them with infrared radiation during beam bombardment. We studied the carbon buildup and the foil temperature on foil lifetime using a 2.0 +/- 0.5 mu A beam of 3.2-MeV Ne(+) ions. It was found that the carbon buildup begins to rapidly suppress at 460 degrees C; further, at a foil temperature higher than approximately 820 degrees C, the initial foil thickness did not change until the foil ruptured. We also found that the carbon buildup shortens the lifetime of stripper foils. The foils treated by the newly developed present method could withstand the maximum and average total beam charges of 530 mC/cm(2) and 340 mC/cm(2), respectively, which are approximately 18 and 11 times larger than the values for the best commercially available foils and approximately 3 and 2 times greater than the values for the cluster foils that are not treated by this method. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.