Diffraction radiation from relativistic heavy ions

Abstract

In recent years, the relativistic heavy ion beams at new accelerator facilities are allowed to obtain some new interesting results (see, for instance, Datz et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 79 (18) (1997) 3355; Ladyrin et al., Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 404 (1998) 129). The problem of non-destructive heavy ion beam diagnostics at these accelerators is highly pressing. The authors of the papers (Rule et al., Proceedings of the Seventh Beam Instrumentation Workshop, Argonne IL, AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 390, NY, 1997; Castellano, Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A 394 (1997) 275) suggested to use diffraction radiation (DR) appearing when a charge moves close to a conducting surface (Bolotovskii and Voskresenskii, Sov. Phys. Usp. 9 (1966) 73) for non-destructive electron beam diagnostics. The DR characteristics are defined by both Lorentz-factor and the particle charge, and do not depend on its mass. The estimation of feasibility of using DR for relativistic ion beam diagnostics is undoubtedly interesting.