Abstract
Recent developments of low-emittance electron guns for accelerator are reviewed. In the accelerator field, DC biased triode thermionic gun (Pierce type gun) has been widely used and is still conventional. On the other hand, because of strong demands on the high brightness electron beam by FEL and other advanced accelerator concepts based on linear accelerator, the low emittance beam generation becomes one of the most important issue in the accelerator science. The R&D effort is “accelerated” by two technological innovations, photo-cathode and RF gun. They made a large improvement on the beam emittance. After the explanations on the technical and physical aspects of the low emittance electron beam generation, advanced electron sources for accelerators are reviewed.
