Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA
The high-intensity, high-brightness and precision frontiers for charged particle beams are an increasingly important focus for study. Ultimately for electron beam applications, including FELs and microscopy, the quality of the source is the limiting factor in the final quality of the beam. It is imperative to understand and develop a new generation of sub-Kelvin electron sources, and the current state of PIC codes are not precise enough to adequately treat this ultracold regime. Our novel computational framework is capable of modelling electron field emission from nanoscale structures on a substrate, with the precision to handle the ultracold regime. This is accomplished by integrating a newly developed Poisson integral solver capable of treating highly curved surfaces and an innovative collisional N-body integrator to propagate the emitted electron with prescribed accuracy. The electrons are generated from a distribution that accounts for quantum confinement and material properties and propagated to the cathode surface. We will discuss the novel techniques that we have developed and implemented, and show emission characteristics for several cathode designs.
