A coincidence system for studying collisional ion dissociation: Application to H+3 in He

Abstract

A simple coincidence circuit has been built and attached to conventional pulse counters to obtain the energy distribution of the coincident ion pair arising from the three-body polar dissociation process H+3+He→H++H++H−. The coincidence circuit is based on TTL components and a solid-state delay line. A method to derive the true coincidence H+–H− energy distribution is described, from which properties such as the inelastic energy loss and angle of proton ejection can be obtained.