A new method for measuring ion clusters produced by charged particles in nanometre track sections of DNA size

A new method is presented for measuring the frequency distribution of ion clusters, formed in nanometre sections of track, by charged particles. The simulated nanometer-size sites are produced in a device, called the Jet Counter. It consists of a pulse-operated valve which injects an expanding jet of nitrogen gas into an interaction chamber. The resulting distributions of ion clusters produced by alpha particle tracks (from 241Am) in sections ranging from 2 to around 10 nm at unit density in nitrogen gas have been measured. Analysis of the experimental results confirm that the primary ionisation distributions produced in the nanometer sections comply with the Poisson distribution. The ionisation cluster distributions produced in the 2–10 nm track-segments are the first ever to be determined experimentally.