2011/07/31 by T. Brunner, A.R. Mueller, A. R. Mueller +11 · 1 citation
Chemistry · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Molecular Physics #Atomic physics #Beam (structure) #Chemistry #Electrical engineering #Electrode #Ion #Ion beam #Ion-surface interactions and analysis #Mass Spectrometry Techniques and Applications #Optics #Optoelectronics #Physics #Polarity (international relations) #Voltage #nucl-ex #physics.acc-ph #physics.chem-ph #physics.ins-det
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.ijms.2011.09.004
20 pages, 13 figures
openalex publication_date 2011/09/11 · arxiv created 2011/09/14 · arxiv updated 2011/09/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Bradbury Nielsen gates are well known devices used to switch ion beams and are typically applied in mass or mobility spectrometers for separating beam constituents by their different flight or drift times. A Bradbury Nielsen gate consists of two interleaved sets of electrodes. If two voltages of the same amplitude but opposite polarity are applied the gate is closed, and for identical (zero) potential the gate is open. Whereas former realizations of the device employ actual wires resulting in difficulties with winding, fixing and tensioning them, our approach is to use two grids photo-etched from a metallic foil. This design allows for simplified construction of gates covering large beam sizes up to at least 900 mm2 with variable wire spacing down to 250 \textmu m. By changing the grids the wire spacing can be varied easily. A gate of this design was installed and systematically tested at TRIUMF's ion trap facility, TITAN, for use with radioactive beams to separate ions with different mass-to-charge ratios by their time-of-flight.