An integrated diagnostic package for intense proton and lithium-ion beam measurements on the sandia national laboratories' PBFA-II accelerator

Abstract

A review of the diagnostic packages used at Sandia National Laboratories to measure the parameters of intense proton and lithium beams generated on the PBFA-II accelerator will be presented. These diagnostics consist of several types, namely: K α X-ray pinhole cameras, a multiframe dE/ dx ion pinhole camera, a p-i-n diode array ion pinhole camera, Thomson parabola spectrographs, a Rutherford magnetic spectrograph, plasma visible spectroscopy and several nuclear activation diagnostics. These components, when taken together, provide a rather thorough description of the 5 MV, 10 TW ion beams presently being produced. Specifically, the beam parameters measured by the diagnostic array include spatial profile (off and on axis), absolute number, species, voltage, current density and focal power density. A unique feature of these diagnostics is that they are capable of operating in hard (several MeV) X-ray bremsstrahlung backgrounds of some 10 9–10 11rad/s. The operating principles of each diagnostic will be summarized in the paper, along with a discussion of how the diagnostics are integrated together to form a complete system. The paper will close with a discussion of a new nuclear track counting system that has been developed for automatic counting of solid-state nuclear track detectors.