SOME APPLICATIONS OF LOW ENERGY ACCELERATORS

Abstract

Accelerators producing ions with energies up to few MeV/amu have been extensively used in the past twenty years mainly in the atomic physics research and its several applications. The investigations first oriented towards the study of the inner-shell ionization through the Z1≪Z2 collisions, moved to the analysis of Z1~Z2 and Z1≫Z2 processes. Several mechanisms including direct Coubmb ionization (Dl), molecular orbital (MO) processes and transfer interaction (TE) excitations were studied this way. The observations of these phenomena stirred up possible explanations and gave deeper insight into the behaviour of the atomic electrons and their mutual correlations. Also several decay channels corresponding to the diagram processes and to the second order effects like satellites, hypersatellites, RAE, RER, etc. have been studied extensively for better understanding of the atomic physics phenomena. Based on the fundamental research, frequent applications using ions as the main research tool emerged. Here methods for the elemental concentrations determination as PIXE, µPIXE, RBS, PIGE and others are most known. Also the use of some of them for the profiling and the surface analysis is important. Above mentioned methods are now extensively and routinely used in several laboratories for environmental studies, material analysis, biomedical research and in other fields.