Submicroscopic analysis of damage structure in nuclear tracks

When some irradiated polymer detectors are analysed at submicroscopic level, four zones can be distinguished in the damaged region surrounding the ion trajectory: core, halo, cross-linking and bulk. The folding track replica technique has been used in previous works to study track profile characteristics. In the present work, starting from track profiles, a method is suggested to evaluate the shape and size of the different track zones. It is applied to 49.5 MeV 19F and 2 MeV 16O ion tracks in Makrofol E.