Carbon buildup monitoring using RBS: Correlation with secondary electrons

The RBS technique is applied to solve the problem of on-line monitoring of the carbon deposited on a thin backed foil under ion bombardment. An iterative method is used to reliably extract quantities such as number of projectiles and target thickness in spite of beam energy changes and detector unstabilities. Experimental values for secondary electron yields are also deduced. Results are reported for the thickness variation of thin carbon foils bombarded with carbon ions of energies between 8.95 and 13 MeV. A linear correlation of this variation is found with both, the ion fluence at target and the number of secondary electrons emitted. The correlation exists even though a wide range of beam currents, beam energies and bombarding times was used during the experiment. The measured electron yields show evidence for a change in the emission process between the original foils and the deposited layer, possibly due to a texture change.