CAPTURE AND CONFINEMENT OF HIGHLY-CHARGED BEAM IONS IN A KINGDON TRAP

Slow multiply-charged Ar(q)+ ions (2 less-than-or-equal-to q less-than -or-equal-to 11) extracted in beams from an electron cyclotron resonan ce ion source have been injected into an electrostatic (Kingdon) ion t rap and confined for times up to a second. Ions were detected at the e nd of the storage interval by ejecting a fraction of them onto a micro channel plate detector. The stored ion numbers were observed to decrea se exponentially with time, indicating that product ions from electron capture collisions were not stored. Photons from the decay of metasta ble ion levels with lifetimes in the millisecond and longer range have also been observed.