Study of beam heating effect in a gas target through Rutherford scattering

A systematic study of αα-beam heating effect on a windowless gas target through Rutherford scattering is described. For such measurements, an ion implanted commercial silicon detector to reveal 100–250 keV alphas is used coupled with a low-noise home-made preamplifier. The results on density reduction of the gas in the target due to beam heating are discussed and their importance for high precision cross section measurements at very low energies are underlined.