Time of Flight Position-Sensitive X-Ray Detection

A new method for recording beam-foil time-of-flight data is described. A stationary, side-window, position-senstive proportional counter, oriented with anode wire parallel to the ion beam, views the decay in flight of excited ions through a Soller slit x-ray collimator. In contrast to the standard method, the exciter foil, placed within or upstream from the field of view, is not moved during the acquisition of a decay curve. Each point on the anode acts like an independent detector seeing a unique segment of the ion beam. The correspondence between the downstream distance at which an ion decays and the position along the anode at which the x-ray is detected makes a pulse-height spectrum of position pulses equivalent to a time-of-flight decay curve. Thus an entire decay curve can now be acquired without moving the foil. Increased efficiency is the most significant improvement over the standard method in which the radiation detector views only a small segment of the flight path at any one time. Experiments using translating foils are subject to a spurious dependence of x-ray intensity on foil position if the foil is non-uniform (or non-uniformly aged) and wobbles as it moves. This effect is eliminated here. Foil aging effects which influence excitation rates and introduce a slowly varying time dependence of the x-ray intensity are automatically normalized by this multichannel technique. The application of this method to metastable x-ray emitting states of low-Z ions will be discussed.