Measurement of the equilibrium charge state distributions of Ni, Co, and Cu beams in Mo at 2 MeV/u: review and evaluation of the relevant semi-empirical models

TL;DR

This study measures the equilibrium charge state distributions of Ni, Co, and Cu beams in Mo at around 2 MeV/u and evaluates semi-empirical models' ability to predict these distributions, proposing a combined model for improved accuracy.

Contribution

The paper provides new experimental data on heavy ion charge state distributions at specific energies and assesses the performance of existing semi-empirical models, introducing a combined model approach.

Findings

Semi-empirical models vary in accuracy for heavy ions at these energies.

A new combined model improves prediction reliability.

Experimental data covers over 99% of the charge state distribution.

Abstract

Equilibrium charge state distributions of stable 60Ni, 59Co, and 63Cu beams passing through a 1um thick Mo foil were measured at beam energies of 1.84 MeV/u, 2.09 MeV/u, and 2.11 MeV/u respectively. A 1-D position sensitive Parallel Grid Avalanche Counter detector (PGAC) was used at the exit of a spectrograph magnet, enabling us to measure the intensity of several charge states simultaneously. The number of charge states measured for each beam constituted more than 99% of the total equilibrium charge state distribution for that elements. Currently, little experimental data exists for equilibrium charge state distributions for heavy ions with 19<Zp,Zt<54 (Zp and Zt, are the projectile's and target's atomic numbers respectively). Hence the success of the semi-empirical models in predicting typical characteristics of equilibrium CSDs (mean charge states and distribution widths), has not been thoroughly tested at the energy region of interest. A number of semi-empirical models from the literature were evaluated in this study, regarding their ability to reproduce the characteristics of the measured charge state distributions. The evaluated models were selected from the literature based on whether they are suitable for the given range of atomic numbers and on their frequent use by the nuclear physics community. Finally, an attempt was made to combine model predictions for the mean charge state, the distribution width and the distribution shape, to come up with a more reliable model. We discuss this new "combinatorial" prescription and compare its results with our experimental data and with calculations using the other semi-empirical models studied in this work.