Development of an automated scanning system for the analysis of heavy ions' fragmentation reaction by nuclear track detectors

An automated analysis system was developed that is able to scan nuclear track detectors CR-39. The system consists of an optical microscope, a CCD camera, a frame grabber and a personal computer. On the latter a software written in Labview language (version 7.1) is implemented to control the motion of the microscope stage, the autofocus function and to measure the geometric characteristics of particle tracks. The system is able to detect and measure couples of partially overlapped tracks. As a preliminary application of this system, we estimated the projectile total charge-changing cross section for a 1 GeV/n iron ion beam impacting a polyethylene target.