Abstract
Pions make up a large part of the hadronic environment typical of accelerator mixed fields. Characterizing device cross sections against pions is usually disregarded in favor of tests with protons, whose single-event latch-up (SEL) cross section is, nonetheless, experimentally found to be lower than that of pions for all energies below 250 MeV. While Monte Carlo simulations are capable of reproducing such behavior, the reason for the observed pion cross-section enhancement can only be explained by a deeper analysis of the underlying mechanisms dominating proton-silicon and pion-silicon reactions. The mechanisms dominating the SEL response are found to vary with the energy under consideration. While a higher pion nuclear reaction rate, that is, probability of interaction, can explain the observed latch-up cross-section enhancement at energies >100 MeV, it is the volume-equivalent linear energy transfer (LET <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EQ</sub> ) of the secondary ions that keeps the pion latch-up response high at lower energies. The higher LET <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">EQ</sub> of secondary ions from pion-silicon interactions is caused by the pion absorption mechanism, which is highly exothermic. In spite of the observed higher cross section for pions, the high-energy hadron approximation is found to still provide reliable estimations of the latch-up response of a device in mixed fields.
Highlights
C HARGED pions are hadrons which, by inelastic interaction with the target nuclei, can release secondary ions capable of causing hazards as critical as single-event latchup (SEL) in electronic devices
For the only exception (R13), which concerns a small amount of accelerator equipment, the underestimation obtained by the single 200-MeV proton testing can be accounted for by assuming a margin of less than 50% on the predicted rate obtained through the high-energy hadron (HEH) approximation
A pion SEL cross-section enhancement was experimentally observed on two static random access memories (SRAMs) for the whole energy range under test
Summary
C HARGED pions are hadrons which, by inelastic interaction with the target nuclei, can release secondary ions capable of causing hazards as critical as single-event latchup (SEL) in electronic devices. While there are at least a few articles in the literature [7], [8] dealing with pion cross section measurements, and one [5] directly dealing with their impact in an accelerator environment, all these studies focused on SEUs. SEL rate predictions in the accelerator environment were shown to be quite a concern for certain memories characterized by strong energy dependence in the proton cross section [9], [10]. For the SEU case [5], it was concluded that the effect on the soft error rate (SER) was limited because the pion resonance was not extending beyond 250 MeV This conclusion has to be verified for SELs in order to confirm that their rates in the accelerator are not underestimated. The obtained simulation benchmarks are used to calculate the SEL rate expected in mixed-field environments and to assess the consequences of the extended pion SEL cross-section enhancement on the HEH equivalence
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