Measurements of proton beam flux and energy of APEP using foil activation technique

Abstract

The activation method of metallic foils is an important technique to measure the flux and energy of proton beams. In this paper, the method was used to measure the CSNS APEP proton flux at seven nominal proton energies ranging from 10 MeV to 70 MeV for beam spot sizes of the 20 mm × 20 mm and 50 mm × 50 mm. The reactions of natTi(p, x)48V, natNi(p, x)57Ni, natCu(p, x)58Co, and 27Al(p, x)24Na were employed to measure the proton beam flux with a range of 107-109 p/cm2/s. Furthermore, we also proposed a method using the activity ratio with a stacked-foil target to determine the energy spread of a Gaussian-like distribution for different nominal proton energies. The optimal combinations of Al, Cu, Ti, Ni, Mo, Fe, Nb, and In foils were adopted for the proton energies. The measured energy spreads for degraded beams of 30 MeV–70 MeV were found to be smaller than 10.00%.

Keywords

• APEP
• Proton flux measurement
• Proton energy measurement
• Activation analysis
• Stacked-foil target