Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

In the literature, conflicting conclusions are reported concerning the charge state dependence of cathodic arc ion energy and velocity distributions. It appears that data from electrostatic energy analyzers indicate charge state dependence of ion energy, whereas time-of-flight methods support charge state independence of ion velocity. Here we present charge-state-resolved ion energy distributions and calculate the corresponding ion velocity distributions in aluminum vacuum arc plasma. We show that the conflicting conclusions reported in the literature for the two different characterization techniques may originate from the commonly employed data interpretation of energy and velocity, in which peak values and average values are not carefully distinguished.