Traceable stopping cross sections of Al and Mo elemental targets for 0.9–3.6-MeV protons

Abstract

Accurate knowledge about the energy loss of ions in matter is essential in many problems, ranging from fundamental to applied nuclear physics. Indeed, there is a recent and increasing demand for new data on stopping cross sections measured with high accuracy and with a rigorous budget of their uncertainty sources. In the present paper we describe an accurate and traceable approach to determine the stopping cross sections in pure elemental materials---aluminum and molybdenum---for protons in the energy range of 0.9--3.6 MeV by the transmission method. The main sources of uncertainties here considered are (i) (random) the uncertainty in the peak positions and in the Gaussian fits and (ii) (systematic) the presence of thickness nonuniformity (a special procedure has been developed to correct it as far as possible). The accuracy in the final stopping cross section is $0.63%$ ($0.32%$ random and $0.54%$ systematic) for Al and $1.5%$ ($0.44%$ random and $1.4%$ systematic) for Mo, both mainly limited by the quality and homogeneity of the foils. For Al, this high accuracy represents an improvement compared to previous publications and serves as a benchmark for our procedure. For Mo, even though the uncertainty is somewhat higher, our results will help in improving the few data currently available in the energy range here considered. The data were also compared to the most commonly employed theoretical models (srim 1985, srim 2013, pstar, and casp 5.2) and Monte Carlo codes (geant 3 and geant 4). The experimental results are electronically available as supplemental material.