The development of a time of flight spectrometer for LARN

An elastic recoil detection time of flight system to depth profile light elements has been developed on ALTAÏS, the new Tandetron accelerator at LARN. The detector mounted at 45° from the beam axis consists of two isochronous electron detectors for the timing signal (START and STOP) and a 450 mm² heavy ion PIPS detector that detects the energy of the recoil atoms. The 2MV Tandem accelerator provides heavy ion beams with a maximum energy of 16 MeV depending on the charge transfer efficiency of the gas exchange canal located in the middle of the machine. A large variety of primary ion beams like ²⁸Si, ³⁵Cl, ⁶³Cu, ¹²⁷I or ¹⁹⁷Au can be produced with the SINIX heavy ion source and accelerated on the target. Typical current around 1 nA can be obtained. The energy transfer to the recoil atoms is typically in the MeV range and depends on the mass and the energy of the projectile. Some secondary effects like the energy loss in the carbon foils of the timing detector but also in the entrance window of the energy detector should not be neglected if we try to depth profile light elements with this technique. Time resolution of about 1 ns for the electrons detectors is suitable to obtain 1 amu mass resolution. Some examples of applications will be developed in this paper.