An Experimental Apparatus for Low Energy High Charge Heavy Ions to Study Collisions on Atomic Hydrogen

The design and performance of a recoil ion source system which includes a recoil ion source, atomic hydrogen thermal oven target and an electrostatic analysis system will be discussed. The recoil ion source produces low velocity highly charged ions via collisions between heavy fast pump beams from the EN tandem accelerator and target gases. Time-of-flight techniques provide initial recoil charge state separation. Collisions of the recoils with atomic hydrogen are being studied. The atomic hydrogen is provided by a thermal oven which features long life time operation and low input power requirements. Dissociation fractions of 80% are achieved for 300 watts of input power. A hemispherical electrostatic analyzer allows the final charge states of the recoil ions to be determined thereby allowing the measurement of charge exchange processes for an energy range of 100 eV/q to 5000 eV/q for the incident recoil ions.