The pulsed beam facility at the 3 MV Van de Graaff accelerator in Florence: Overview and examples of applications

Abstract

An electrostatic chopper has been installed at the KN 3000 accelerator in Florence to obtain short beam pulses with a number of particles per pulse whose average value can be chosen by varying the current intensity at the deflector plates input. Beam pulses can be obtained containing an average number of particles per pulse from less than one to thousands. The transmitted beam pulses can be as short as 200 ps FWHM, at a repetition rate up to about 100 kHz. Among the many applications of the facility, the direct measurement of energy loss and straggling of protons in Kapton and aluminium is reported. In this measurement, the facility has been tuned for transmission of mainly single-proton pulses; the beam energy is directly measured downstream with a good energy-resolution detector, without and with absorbers in front. In general, measurements of this kind can be directed both to study the basic processes of charged particles interactions in materials, or more practically to obtain the effective values of energy parameters useful in many IBA applications, avoiding the need to rely on simulations or theoretical estimates. Also briefly described is an application to Si-detector testing. In this case, the facility has been tuned for transmission of pulses containing many hundreds of protons of energy E p=2.5 MeV and the detector is directly exposed to the pulses. Spectra containing equally spaced peaks at energies multiple of E p are obtained and the response linearity of the detector plus electronics system can thus be checked.