Measured and simulated depth-profiles of fragments induced by 200 MeV/u 40Ar ion beam in copper

Abstract

This work is a further contribution to our long-term experimental studies of activation- and fragmentation-related effects induced by high-energy heavy-ion irradiation in selected accelerator-construction materials. A stacked-foil copper target consisting of thin foils with different thicknesses was irradiated by 200 MeV/u 40Ar ions. Gamma spectra of the radiation emitted from the activated foils were measured and the nuclides created in the foils as a result of nuclear interaction between the 40Ar ions and the copper target nuclei were identified. The activities of all identified nuclides have been determined from the gamma spectra. The measured activity of each nuclide has been converted to the number of nuclei (of that nuclide) contained in the foil. Finally, the depth-profiles of the induced nuclides, i.e. the number of the induced nuclei as a function of the target depth, have been constructed and analyzed. The measured depth-profiles provide information on physical mechanisms of the high-energy heavy-ion fragmentation. The measured depth-profiles have been also compared with the simulated ones obtained with FLUKA2020. Keeping in mind complexity of the nucleus-nucleus interactions in the broad energy interval, the measured and simulated depth-profiles show a reasonable agreement. However, in some cases, discrepancies between the measured and the simulated depth-profiles have been observed. These cases are presented and discussed in the paper, as they can serve improvement of physical models implemented in the simulation codes.