Development of a multipurpose beam foil spectroscopy set-up for the low cross-section measurements

A multipurpose facility for low cross section measurements has been developed at Inter University Accelerator Centre, New Delhi, India. The facility consists of a multipurpose miniature chamber equipped with 1 m focal length normal incidence Monochromator and charge coupled device based detection system which has been aligned to realize the best resolution of the spectrometer. The chamber in this facility collects radiation 100 times more efficiently from the older system, without using any extra focusing mirror assembly. It is ensured to have the provision of mounting an X-ray detector and the spectrometer transverse to the beam direction simultaneously in the same chamber. The atomic spectroscopic studies can be performed by interaction of ions beams with both thin foil and gas targets. Provision for using photomultiplier tube instead of charge coupled device, is employed in the system depending on the condition of the source strength or other detection issues. We observed the essence of a very weak atomic phenomenon, a triply excited autoionizing forbidden transition, using the above facility to demonstrate its capability for measuring such low cross section phenomena. The present developed facility covers a large spectroscopic region from X-rays to the near infrared (0.1–10,000 Å).