A new mini gas ionization chamber for IBA applications

Novel prototypes of high resolution gas ionization chambers (GIC) were designed with increased compactness and simplicity of the setup. They have no Frisch-grid and a simple anode wire. Under certain operating conditions these mini detectors have an energy resolution comparable with that of state-of-the-art GICs of much higher complexity. They can be operated both under vacuum and atmospheric pressure. First measurements were made with protons in the energy range of 0.3–1.0 MeV. For protons at 0.3 MeV an energy resolution of about 12 keV was achieved. With a 72 MeV 129Xe beam a relative resolution of 1.4% was obtained. Due to their versatility and reduced size the detectors can easily be applied in the field of ion beam analysis (IBA) and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS). Since they are almost completely insensitive to radiation damage they are especially suited for use in high fluence applications such as scanning transmission ion microscopy (STIM). A comparison of the radiation hardness of the mini GIC with a Si PIN diode was therefore performed. The GIC showed no peak shift or change in energy resolution at all after collecting 1015 protons per cm2 while the performance of the Si detector clearly started to degrade at 1012 particles per cm2.