Technical description of the CENBG nanobeam line

Abstract

Two years ago, the CENBG has commissioned the AIFIRA (Application Interdisciplinaire des Faisceaux d’Ions en Aquitaine) facility for the development of an interdisciplinary research program based on a 3.5 MV Singletron ™ accelerator (HVEE, The Netherlands). In addition to the existing beam lines, this facility is being equipped with a high demagnification focused beam line allowing the focusing of protons, deuterons and alpha particles down to a sub-micrometer resolution. This so-called “nanobeam line”, based on a long working distance doublet–triplet of Oxford Microbeams Ltd., OM-50 ™ quadrupoles, is at its final stage of development. The chosen layout of the beam line has been computed in details using the GEANT4 simulation toolkit. In the simulations, experimental measurements of the beam emittance at the entrance slits have been used to obtain more realistic beam distributions and intensities along the full beam line. According to these simulations, a beam resolution of about 300 nm in high current mode and below 100 nm in STIM mode is expected. The components of the beam line have been mounted at the 0° output of the Singletron ™ switching magnet and the fine alignment will be performed using the ion beam in the coming weeks. In the present paper, all the major components of the CENBG nanobeam line are described in details.