Characteristics and use of a high resolution E-E gas-ionisation detector for nuclear particle identification
Date
2010-08-04
Authors
Jingo, Maxwell
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Abstract
Certain particle identification detectors operate on the principle of energy loss. The ΔE-E gas-ionisation telescope is a good example of such a detector, where incident ions traverse the ΔE gas-ionisation cavity of the detector and stop in a solid-state silicon surface-barrier E detector. Signals from the detectors are amplified and, if they meet certain time coincidence and amplitude criteria they are added together to provide the total ion energy. From the previous study done at iThemba LABS (Gauteng), a gas mixture of argon and methane was used, but in this particular study, iso-butane was used and new ΔE detector operating conditions were determined. Furthermore, an elastic-scattering angular distribution for the scattering reaction of 16O + 28Si was also obtained by bombarding an evaporated self-supporting SiO2 target with a heavy-ion beam of 16O at an incident energy of 30.000 ± 0.038 MeV. The scattered 16O particles were detected by the ΔE-E gas-ionisation detector and the CAMAC + WIMPS2 data acquisition system was used to identify the particles on-line. The present data are consistent with those obtained previously using the same system for an incident beam energy of 32 MeV. In addition, the reliability and integrity of the refurbished EN Tandem accelerator and beam line (C-line) has been demonstrated.