The Design of the Emission Layer for Electron Multipliers

Abstract The electron multipliers gain is closely related to the secondary electron emission coefficient (SEE) of the emission layer materials. The SEE is closely related to the thickness of the emission layer. If the emission layer is thin, the low SEE causes the low gain of electron multipliers. If the emission layer is thick, the conductive layer can't timely supplement charge to the emission layer, the electronic amplifier gain is low too. The electron multipliers usually choose Al2O3 and MgO film as the emission layer because of the high SEE level. MgO easy deliquescence into Mg(OH)2 resulting in the lower SEE level. The SEE level of Al2O3 is lower than MgO, but Al2O3 is stable. We designed a spherical system for testing the SEE level of materials, and proposed to use lowenergy secondary electrons instead of low-energy electron beam for neutralization to measuring the SEE level of Al2O3, MgO, MgO/Al2O3, Al2O3/MgO, and precisely control the film thickness by using atomic layer deposition (ALD). We propose to compare the SEE under the adjacent incident electrons energy to partition the SEE value of the material, and obtain four empirical formula for the relationship between SEE and thickness. Through experiments and calculations, we put forward a new emission layer for electron multipliers, including 2~3 nm Al2O3 buffer layer, 9nm MgO main-body layer, 1nm protective layer or 0.3nm enhancement layer. We can apply this new emission layer to channel electron multiplier (CEM), microchannel plate (MCP), separate electron multiplier.