Lead evaporation instabilities and failure mechanisms of the micro oven at the GTS-LHC ECR ion source at CERN

The GTS-LHC ECR ion source (named after the Grenoble Test Source and the Large Hadron Collider) at CERN provides heavy ion beams for the chain of accelerators from Linac3 up to the LHC for high energy collision experiments and to the Super Proton Synchrotron for fixed target experiments. During the standard operation, the oven technique is used to evaporate lead into the source plasma to produce multiple charged lead ion beams. Intensity and stability are key parameters for the beam, and the operational experience is that some of the source instabilities can be linked to the oven performance. Over long operation periods of several weeks, the evaporation is not stable which makes the tuning of the oven unpredictable and nonreproducible. A dedicated test stand is used to study the oven performance and possible improvements independently of the source operation. It was observed that the measured evaporation rate of the oven can vary spontaneously in a wide range even when stable operating conditions are applied to the oven controls. Data collected at the test stand hint that these fluctuations are caused by temperature instabilities of the oven itself. Several ways to improve the oven stability were tested, including insulation changes and modifications of the oven crucible. Some of the most promising results regarding the stability of the evaporation will be presented in this paper.