Polarized electron gun development at the Brookhaven National Laboratoy

Development of two different polarized electron guns is ongoing at BNL. One aims at extremely high brightness at a moderate beam current. This design uses a superconducting RF gun and a test setup is built to show that a Gallium-Arsenide cathode with negative affinity has a sufficiently long quantum efficiency lifetime in such an environment. An electron injector using this technology may eliminate the need of the electron damping ring and a long transport line at the International Linear Collider. The other project aims at producing a high beam current with moderate emittance requirements, dubbed the "Gatling gun". In this DC gun, bunches are extracted from 20 separate cathodes and merged into a single beam using a rotating magnetic field. Such an electron gun could serve as an injector for the electron-ion collider eRHIC, which is planned at BNL. We will report on the status of these projects.