A Method for Calibrating a Van de Graaff Accelerator System

Positive ion HV Van de Graaff accelerators produce quite intense X radiation from the HV terminal. This report describes an absolute method of obtaining the accelerating voltage V by the straightforward experimental measurement of the X radiation energies using a low energy photon detector and a multichainnel analyzer. The comparison of the accelerating voltage V measured with this proposed method and the voltage measured from tne magnetic energy analysis of the proton beam was very good in the 80-160 kV range.