The pulsed beam facility at the Tandetron accelerator in Florence

An electrostatic chopper has been installed in the LABEC laboratory (Sesto Fiorentino) along one of the beamlines of the new Tandetron accelerator. The chopper allows us the creation of a pulsed beam, from a continuous one, with a variable and finely controllable number of particles in each pulse. The facility can be tuned to obtain an average of one ion per pulse. This feature allows us the study of the basic processes of particle–target interactions, useful when performing ion beam analysis. Increasing the beam current, bunches up to thousands of ions can be obtained with a total energy being always an integer multiple of the one of the single ion. This configuration can be employed e.g. in a detector energy calibration.