Simultaneous assessment of energy, charge state and angular distribution for medium energy ions interacting with ultra-thin self-supporting targets: a time-of-flight approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel time-of-flight method for simultaneously measuring energy, charge state, and angular distribution of medium energy ions transmitted through ultra-thin self-supporting targets, enhancing ion characterization techniques.

Contribution

Introduction of an electrostatic deflection setup combined with time-of-flight measurements for comprehensive ion analysis in transmission experiments.

Findings

Successfully discriminated and quantified multiple charge states of ions.

Achieved simultaneous measurement of ion energy and angular distribution.

Validated results with existing literature data.

Abstract

We demonstrate simultaneous measurements of the charge state, energy and angular distribution of keV ions in transmission experiments through self-supporting foils. Using a time-of-flight approach we have introduced an electrostatic deflection apparatus as an extension to existing medium energy ion scattering (MEIS) instrumentation. Different positive, neutral and negative charge states have been discriminated and quantified for initially singly charged beams of He, N, O and Ne in the energy range from 25 to 250 keV. In parallel, the ion energy after interaction with the target has been assessed for all detected particles, while particles can be discriminated by deflection angle. Self-supporting thin carbon foils were used as samples to benchmark our experiments with literature data where available.