Fragmentation cross-section of 600 A MeV Si14+ ions in thick polyethylene target

TLDR: In this paper, the total and partial charge-changing crosssections of 600 A MeV Si14+ ions in a thick polyethylene target were measured by CR39 track etch detectors using an optical microscope DM 6000 M system installed with Leica QWin Plus software.

Abstract: Total and partial charge-changing cross-sections of 600 A MeV Si14+ ions in a thick polyethylene target were measured by CR39 track etch detectors using an optical microscope DM 6000 M system installed with Leica QWin Plus software. The CR39 nuclear track detectors were used to identify the incident charged particles and their fragments using the cone-height distribution method. The charge resolution of CR39 detectors was achieved to be 0.17e in the present condition. The value of the total charge-changing cross-section was calculated to be σ tot = (766±17) mb. To calculate the partial charge-changing cross-sections for ΔZ = −11, −10, ..., −1, , number of events corresponding to each fragment were determined from multiple Gaussian fitting of cone-height distributions within 95.5% confidence level and the number of incident and survived beam ions were counted within 99.7% confidence level. Possible odd-even pattern in the values of the partial charge-changing cross-section is also presented. The measured charge pick-up cross-section for ΔZ = +1 is (7.2 ±1.7) mb.