Note: Fabrication of roughened tips for liquid metal ion sources
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Updated: Feb 27, 2026
A Method to Manipulate Surface Tension of a Liquid Metal via Surface Oxidation and Reduction
Published on: January 26, 2016
Dengshuai Guo1, Xiaoming Kang1, Jing Hu1
1State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Abstract:
In a liquid metal ion source (LMIS), the radius and the surface texture of the LMIS needle tip are demonstrated to have great effect on the I-V characteristics and the threshold voltages. In this paper, the dependence of the AC electrochemical etching parameters on the radius and the surface texture of the needle tip is investigated experimentally. A new method for fabricating the needle tip with the designed radius and texture for the LMIS is proposed. In this method, the roughening of a needle tip consists of two processes: a short time high AC voltage etching process and a long time low AC voltage etching process. The performances of the presented method are validated by a number of experiments.
