A beam of ions in the fonn of "canal rays" was first observed in 1886 by E. Goldstein. The first ion source was invented by J. J. Thomson in 1910. This ion source became the basis for the first widespread application of ion sources in mass spectrographs and mass spectrometers. The second important application of ion sources is ion accelerators, which since the beginning of the 1930s have been employed in research on nuclear reactions and are now used in industry and medicine. A third application of ion sources is in systems for isotope separation and re- search on the interaction of atomic...
A beam of ions in the fonn of "canal rays" was first observed in 1886 by E. Goldstein. The first ion source was invented by J. J. Thomson in 1910. Thi...