D-Pace heartily congratulates Dr Nicolas Savard on his successful defence of his PhD dissertation!

Dr Savard has developed and studied a Penning ion source for use with Helium gas for the ultimate purpose of achieving a cost-effective alpha source for medical radioisotope cyclotrons. With a combination of designing and engineering a prototype, and modelling simulations, Dr Savard has extracted He+ particle beams as well as alpha particle beams.  Interestingly, the Penning Source is useful for achieving 1+ to 6+ charge states for ions of interest to the Semi-conductor industry (ion implantation).

We wish to thank and acknowledge Buckley Systems and TRIUMF for their support in this work. Dr Savard would also like to thank UBC and MITACS for financial support for this research.