Electrostatic lens

An electrostatic lens is a device that uses electric fields to focus charged particles or beams of charged particles. It can be described as a thick lens with principal planes and focal points, similar to a lens in light optics. A simple electrostatic lens can be created using two point charges or uniformly charged spheres. The electrostatic lens is not dependent on the physical size or mass/charge ratio of the particles it is focusing.From: Handbook of Charged Particle Optics [2017], Electromagnetics [2018], A compact electrostatic lens for velocity map imaging experiments [2022]

Electrostatic Lenses

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Published in Orloff Jon, Handbook of Charged Particle Optics, 2017

Bohumila Lencová

At the moment we do not have a fully general optimization method, but rather a number of approaches each applied to a specific problem. Frequently, standard optimization methods are applied to find an optimum electrostatic lens design. Glatzel and Lenz (1988) prefer to use parameters related directly to the potentials on electrodes and to the shape and position of the field-forming electrodes as optimization variables. They succeeded in improving published results of Szilagyi (1983), which was claimed to be an optimum design of an immersion lens for ion beam lithography. Benez et al. (1995) also varied the geometric parameters, using the optimization based on a genetic algorithm, and documented the success of the method by improving the resolution of the well-known asymmetric lens of Orloff and Swanson (1979).

A compact electrostatic lens for velocity map imaging experiments

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Published in Molecular Physics, 2022

E. Sakkoula, B. G. M. van Oorschot, D. H. Parker

There are many tradeoffs to consider when designing a compact VMI setup. The electrostatic lens, in principle, works independently of the physical size and mass/charge ratio. However, the size of the ionisation region still imposes physical limitations due to the finite molecular beam – laser beam interaction area. VMI removes to first order the dependence on spatial position, but mapping quality decreases from the ideal case when the spatial dimensions of the laser molecular beam interaction region becomes too large.1 Other factors limiting VMI resolution include space charge, ion recoil, and collimation of molecular beam, which can limit the ultimate resolution for any lens design.

Electrostatic lens

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Electrostatic Lenses

A compact electrostatic lens for velocity map imaging experiments