Double Acceleration of Ions and Application in Biomaterials

Ions of different elements were generated by laser-induced-plasma and accelerated by a two adjacent cavities. Therefore, the ions undergo a double acceleration imparting a maximum ion energy of 160 keV per charge state. We analyzed the extracted charge from a Cu target as a function of the accelerating voltage. At 60 kV of total accelerating voltage, the maximum current peak was of 5.3 mA. The ion flux resulted of 3.4x10(11) ions/cm(2). The normalized emittance measured by pepper pot method at 60 kV was of 0.22 pi mm mrad. By means of this machine, biomedical materials as UHMWPE were implanted with carbon and titanium ions. At a total ion flux of 2x10(15) ions/cm(2) the polyethylene surface increased its micro hardness of about 3-hold measured by the scratch test. Considering the ion emission cone dimension, we estimated a total extracted charge per pulse of 200 nC.