On the origin of the low energy tail in charged particle spectra

Methods to eliminate the contribution of detector deficiencies and an ion beam perturbation to the low energy part of the charged particle spectra measured with a surface-barrier detector are developed.A ΔE-E detector telescope was used to reveal the low energy tail in the detector response function and a time-of-flight technique was employed for the investigation of the effects associated with the ion beam. As a result of the experimental study neither the incident ion beam nor the detector was found to be responsible for the low energy tail. The target was identified as the source of the low energy particles of intensity exceeding the predictions of double and higher order scattering models.