Production of Deuterated Polymer Thin Films for Ion-Beam Fusion Experiments

The SUNY Geneseo Accelerator Laboratory consists of a 1.7 MV Tandem Pelletron Accelerator from the National Electrostatic Corporation (NEC). The Alphatross RF Alkali Charge-Exchange ion source is capable of producing a 30 nano-amp deuterium beam with a maximum energy of 3.4 MeV. In this experiment, a 3 MeV deuteron beam is incident on an 40Ar gas cell. The subsequent 40Ar(d,p) reaction produces 41Ar which beta decays to the first excited state of 41K 99.1% of the time. The excited 41K promptly decays and emits a 1.293 MeV gamma ray. The emitted gamma is detected with a high purity germanium gamma ray detector positioned alongside the Argon gas cell. The radioactive 41Ar gas will be used as an electron calibration source for a phoswitch detector in ICF and HEDP nuclear reaction studies.