Permanent Magnet Electron Optics for Low Energy Electron Systems: The Art of Extraordinary Performance from Ordinary Components

Permanent magnet electron optics offer many advantages over electromagnets, and are being increasingly used in high-energy (GeV) electron accelerator designs. Here, we identify the advantages of permanent magnet electron optics for low-energy (keV) electron accelerators. We explore the applications of a class of designs based on axially magnetized permanent magnets, which offer a variety of advantages such as short focal lengths (few mm), while also preventing apparent emittance growth resulting from starting particles in a magnetic field. The proposed design philosophy is applied to an accelerator based on the ultracold electron source. The design is shown to be `emittance preserving' even for very short focal lengths (~5 mm) at an emittance level better than 1 nm-rad, while the short beamline (12 cm) limits space-charge effects. Two remedies for the mitigation of typical manufacturing and alignment challenges are considered. The performance of the design (related to parasitic aberrations) is enhanced by the proposed techniques. Applications of this design philosophy can improve the performance of ultrafast electron diffraction setups with minimal manufacturing effort.