Applications of PADC nuclear track detectors in laser-driven particle acceleration experiments

Abstract

  A stack of CR-39 detectors is utilized to identify high energy ions generated in laser-driven ion acceleration experiments using cluster targets. Detailed etch pit analysis using microscopes revealed that ions were penetrated through several successive CR-39 layers at exactly the same lateral and vertical positions, and vanish at some layers depending on the initial ion energies. We observed the ion tracks up to the 11th layer and none in the 12th layer, which corresponds to maximum ion energies of 10-20 MeV/n.