Ion Beam Scattering by Background Helium

The presence of background gases can cause charged particle beams to become more diffuse due to scattering. Calculations for the transport of an ion beam have been performed using Aleph, a particle-in-cell plasma modeling code, and verified against a general envelop equation for charged particle beams. We have investigated the influence of background helium on the coherence and transmitted current of the ion beam. Collisions between ions and neutral particles were calculated assuming isotropic elastic scattering. Since this tends to predict larger scattering angles than are expected at high energies, these are conservative estimates for beam scattering.