A particle detector for energetic ions

Abstract

A fast ion detector based on secondary electron emission from an aluminium surface is described. The secondary electrons are accelerated by 1.2 kV and detected by two microchannel plates in cascade configuration. Applying channel plates to the secondary electrons leads to the same detector efficiency as with the channeltron but at a much higher counting rate. The efficiency of the detector for 150 keV protons was measured as a counting rate of 0.8 at 1 MHz.