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An ion movie camera for particle-beam-fusion experiments

Stygar, William A.

A camera with 3-ns time resolution -- and a continuous (> 100-ns) record length -- has been developed to image a 10{sup 12}-10{sup 13} W/cm{sup 2} ion beam for inertial-confinement-fusion experiments. A thin gold Rutherford-scattering foil placed in the path of the beam scatters ions into the camera. The foil is in a near-optimized scattering geometry and reduces the beam intensity seven orders of magnitude. The scattered ions are pinhole imaged onto a 2-D array of 39 p-i-n diode detectors. The output of each detector is recorded on a LeCroy 6880 transient-waveform digitizer. The waveforms are analyzed and combined to produce a 39-pixel movie which can be displayed on an image processor to provide, for example, time-resolved horizontal- and vertical-focusing information.