Irradiation Facility at the Garching MP-tandem accelerator
Two dedicated experimental areas at the tandem laboratory are
used for proton or neutron irradiation of detectors.
Beam currents between sub-picoampere and microampere
are possible. For the neutron production deuteron breakup
on light nuclei is used. This allows for high-energy neutron
fluxes of up to 10^7 Hz/cm^2 with average energy of 11 MeV
and an energy spread of 5 MeV.
Proton Irradiation
A protoype muon chamber of small-diameter (15mm) drift-tubes
is exposed to 20 MeV protons to study the
rate-capability of the hardware and the electronics.
Two selected tubes in the middle of the array
are irradiated from the side with
protons on an area of 7 cm x 0.3 cm
with rates of up to 2 MHz. The non-irradiated
tubes in the other layers provide precision muon tracking.
The segmented trigger allows to disentangle rate-effects
due to space-charge effects or electronic limitation of rate.
Neutron Irradiation
Neutron irradition with rates of 10^7 Hz/cm^2 of
Micromegas detectors and a 15mm drift tube detector
with trigger on cosmic muons.
The neutron-flux is almost homogeneous in a cone
with 60 degrees opening angle.
PSD and neutron detectors
Pulse shape discriminating scintillators, developed for the high-rate neutron irradiation, together with BF3 neutron counters allow for unfolding the gamma- and neutron fluxes. Thus accurate irradiation diagnostics is possible.
