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GaAs-based photocathodes are the most popular electron sources for producing highly spin-polarized electron beams in accelerator physics and condensed matter physics. Spin-polarized photoemission requires activation to achieve Negative Electron Affinity (NEA). Conventional NEA surfaces such as CS-O/NF3 are extremely vacuum sensitive, and this results in rapid QE degradation. In this work, we activated GaAs with various recipes using Cs, Te, and oxygen. We demonstrate NEA activation on GaAs surfaces. Among Cs-Te activated samples, the oxidized sample showed the highest QE and longest lifetime at 780 nm., Proceedings of the 13th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2022, Bangkok, Thailand

Operational lifetime of GaAs photocathodes is the primary limit for applications as high current spin polarized electron sources in future nuclear physics facilities, such as Electron Ion Collider. Recently, ultrathin Cs₂Te on GaAs has shown a successful negative electron affinity (NEA) activation with an improved lifetime by a factor of 5 *. In this work, we report activation of GaAs with Cs, Sb and oxygen. Four different methods of introducing oxygen during the growth was investigated. Cs-Sb-O activated GaAs has shown up to a factor of 40 and 13 improvement in charge extraction lifetime and dark lifetime, respectively., Proceedings of the North American Particle Accelerator Conference, NAPAC2019, Lansing, MI, USA

Operating photocathodes near the photoemission threshold holds the promise of yielding small intrinsic emittance, at the cost of significantly reduced quantum efficiency. In modern femtosecond photoemission electron sources, this requires a very high intensity (10s of GW/cm²) to extract a useful quantity of electrons. At this intensity, the electron occupation function is far from equilibrium and evolves rapidly on sub-ps timescales. Thus, ultrafast laser heating and multiphoton photoemission effects may play a significant role in emission, thereby increasing the minimum achievable emittance. In this work, we use a Boltzmann equation approach to calculate the non-equilibrium occupation function evolution in time for a copper photocathode, yielding a prediction of quantum efficiency and mean transverse energy as a function of input intensity., Proceedings of the 9th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada

High intensity and highly spin-polarized electron source is of great interest to the next generation Electron Ion Colliders. GaAs prepared by the standard activation method, which is the most widely used spin-polarized photocathode, is notorious for its vacuum sensitivity and short operational lifetime. To improve the lifetime of GaAs photocathodes, we activated GaAs by Cs2Te, a material well known for its robustness. We confirmed the Cs2Te layer forms negative electron affinity on GaAs with a factor of 5 improvement in lifetime. Furthermore, the new activation method had no adverse effect on spin-polarization. Considering Cs2Te forms much thicker activation layer (~ 2 nm) compared to the standard activation layer (~ monolayer), our results trigger a paradigm shift on new activation methods with other robust materials that were avoided for their thickness., Proceedings of the 9th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Cornell University is a leader in the development of photocathode materials for the production of high brightness electron beam sources for applications in large scale accelerators and small scale electron scattering experiments. During the last year we have also included Mott polarimetry to investigate long lifetime spin-polarized photocathodes materials. Another thrust of our laboratory is the exploration of ultra low emittance photocathodes at cryogenic temperatures, for which we are building a novel LHe cryogenic electron source. We will review updates from our lab across each of these areas., Proceedings of the 9th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2018, Vancouver, BC, Canada