No Arabic abstract
The design, construction, installation, and testing of a Faraday Cup intended to measure the current of a 3 MeV, 1 microampere electron beam is described. Built as a current monitor for a M{o}ller scattering measurement at the MIT High Voltage Research Laboratory, the device combines a large angular acceptance with the capability to measure a continuous, low energy beam. Bench studies of its performance demonstrate current measurements accurate to the percent level at 1 microampere. The Faraday Cup was designed and constructed at MIT and has been in use at the HVRL since 2017, providing a significantly more detailed measurement of beam current than was previously available.
A large acceptance scintillator detector with wavelength shifting optical fibre readout has been designed and built to detect the decay particles of $eta$-nucleus bound system (the so-called $eta$-mesic nuclei), namely, protons and pions. The detector, named as ENSTAR detector, consists of 122 pieces of plastic scintillator of various shapes and sizes, which are arranged in a cylindrical geometry to provide particle identification, energy loss and coarse position information for these particles. A solid angle coverage of $sim$95% of total 4$pi$ is obtained in the present design of the detector. Monte Carlo phase space calculations performed to simulate the formation and decay of $eta$-mesic nuclei suggest that its decay particles, the protons and pions are emitted with an opening angle of 150$^circ pm 20^circ$, and with energies in the range of 25 to 300 MeV and 225 to 450 MeV respectively. The detailed GEANT simulations show that $sim$ 80 % of the decay particles (protons and pions) can be detected within ENSTAR. Several test measurements using alpha source, cosmic-ray muons etc. have been carried out to study the response of ENSTAR scintillator pieces. The in-beam tests of fully assembled detector with proton beam of momentum 870 MeV/c from the Cooler synchrotron COSY have been performed. The test results show that the scintillator fiber design chosen for the detector has performed satisfactorily well. The present article describes the detector design, simulation studies, construction details and test results.
The FlatDot detector has been used to demonstrate the separation of Cherenkov and scintillation light for 1 to 2MeV electrons in linear alkylbenzene (LAB). With an average PMT transit time spread (TTS) of 200ps, the early light in each event is clearly dominated by the Cherenkov signal, which on average comprises $86^{+2}_{-3}%$ of the light collected in the first 4.1ns of each event. The spatial distributions of the Cherenkov and scintillation light are found to match those predicted in Monte Carlo simulations. This is a key step towards demonstrating direction reconstruction of $beta$ decays, a technique that could reduce $^8$B solar neutrino backgrounds for neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments in liquid scintillator.
High electronic excitations in radiation of metallic targets with swift heavy ion beams at the coulomb barrier play a dominant role in the damaging processes of some metals. The inelastic thermal spike model was developed to describe tracks in materials and is applied in this paper to some systems beams/targets employed recently in some nuclear physics experiments. Taking into account the experimental conditions and the approved electron-phonon coupling factors, the results of the calculation enable to interpret the observation of the fast deformation of some targets.
Radiative alpha-capture, ($alpha,gamma$), reactions play a critical role in nucleosynthesis and nuclear energy generation in a variety of astrophysical environments. The St. George recoil separator at the University of Notre Dames Nuclear Science Laboratory was developed to measure ($alpha,gamma$) reactions in inverse kinematics via recoil detection in order to obtain nuclear reaction cross sections at the low energies of astrophysical interest, while avoiding the $gamma$-background that plagues traditional measurement techniques. Due to the $gamma$-ray produced by the nuclear reaction at the target location, recoil nuclei are produced with a variety of energies and angles, all of which must be accepted by St. George in order to accurately determine the reaction cross section. We demonstrate the energy acceptance of the St. George recoil separator using primary beams of helium, hydrogen, neon, and oxygen, spanning the magnetic and electric rigidity phase space populated by recoils of anticipated ($alpha,gamma$) reaction measurements. We found the performance of St. George meets the design specifications, demonstrating its suitability for ($alpha,gamma$) reaction measurements of astrophysical interest.
Bradbury Nielsen gates are well known devices used to switch ion beams and are typically applied in mass or mobility spectrometers for separating beam constituents by their different flight or drift times. A Bradbury Nielsen gate consists of two interleaved sets of electrodes. If two voltages of the same amplitude but opposite polarity are applied the gate is closed, and for identical (zero) potential the gate is open. Whereas former realizations of the device employ actual wires resulting in difficulties with winding, fixing and tensioning them, our approach is to use two grids photo-etched from a metallic foil. This design allows for simplified construction of gates covering large beam sizes up to at least 900,mm$^2$ with variable wire spacing down to 250,textmu m. By changing the grids the wire spacing can be varied easily. A gate of this design was installed and systematically tested at TRIUMFs ion trap facility, TITAN, for use with radioactive beams to separate ions with different mass-to-charge ratios by their time-of-flight.