The design of an electron gun capable of producing beam emittance one order of magnitude lower than current technology would reduce considerably the cost and size of a free electron laser emitting at 0.1nm. Field emitter arrays (FEAs) including a gate and a focusing layer are an attractive technology for such high brightness sources. Electrons are extracted from micrometric tips thanks to voltage pulses between gate and tips. The focusing layer should then reduce the initial divergence of each emitted beamlets. This FEA will be inserted in a high gradient diode configuration coupled with a radiofrequency structure. In the diode part very high electric field pulses (several hundreds of MV/m) will limit the degradation of emittance due to space charge effect. This first acceleration will be obtained with high voltage pulses (typically a megavolt in a few hundred of nanoseconds) synchronized with the low voltage pulses applied to the FEA (typically one hundred of volts in one nanosecond at frequency below kilohertz). This diode part will then be followed by an RF accelerating structure in order to bring the electrons to relativistic energies.

The development of a new electron gun with the lowest possible emittance would help reducing the total length and cost of a free electron laser. Field emitter arrays (FEAs) are an attractive technology for electron sources of ultra high brightness. Indeed, several thousands of microscopic tips can be deposited on a 1 mm diameter area. Electrons are then extracted by applying voltage to a first grid layer close to the tip apexes, the so called gate layer, and focused by a second grid layer one micrometer above the tips. The typical aperture diameter of the gate and the focusing layer is in the range of one micrometer. One challenge for such cathodes is to produce peak currents in the ampere range since the usual applications of FEAs require less than milliampere. Encouraging peak current performances have been obtained by applying voltage pulses at low frequency between gate and tips. In this paper we report on different tip materials available on the market: diamond FEAs from Extreme Devices Inc., ZrC single tips from Applied Physics Technologies Inc. and Mo FEAs from SRI International.