Researchers Develop a Broadband High-resolution Crystal Spectrometer----Institute of Modern Physics

18 04, 2024

Researchers Develop a Broadband High-resolution Crystal Spectrometer

Researchers at the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have developed a broadband, high-resolution crystal spectrometer for precision X-ray fine structure measurements of inner-shell multi-vacancy ions. Their research was published in the journal Spectrochimica Acta Part B: Atomic Spectroscopy on April 3.

Investigating the X-ray fine structure of inner-shell multi-vacancy ions not only provides valuable insights into quantum electrodynamics and quantum many-body interactions, but also holds considerable application potential in various research areas such as astrophysics, high-energy-density physics, and laser-plasma physics.

Traditional X-ray detectors, such as high purity germanium detectors and silicon drift detectors, offer broad measuring bandwidths but lack the necessary energy spectral resolving power to discern fine X-ray structures due to limitations in electron-hole pair statistics.

To address these limitations, researchers at the Atomic Physics Research Center of IMP developed a novel curved crystal spectrometer geometry. It was proved practical through mathematical validation, as this innovative approach ensures a wide measurement bandwidth while maintaining the spectrometer’s resolution.

The newly developed crystal spectrometer exhibits an impressive single-exposure bandwidth ranging from 0.25 to 1.2 keV over a dynamic range of 0.6 to 18 keV. In addition, it achieves a resolving power of better that 10³over the entire dynamic range and demonstrates a two-orders-of-magnitude enhancement in detection efficiency compared with conventional planar crystal spectrometers.

These advances lay the groundwork for the experimental study of exotic electromagnetic transitions involving multi-vacancy ions at facilities such as the Cooling Storage Ring at the Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou, the Low Energy intense-highly-charged ion Accelerator Facility, and the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility.

This work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sab.2024.106918

Figure 1. Mechanical structure of the spectrometer and typical test results. (Image by WANG Wei and SHAO Caojie)

Contact:

LIU Fang

Institute of Modern Physics

Email: fangliu@impcas.ac.cn

Appendix(s)：

Contact Information

LIU Fang

Email: fangliu@impcas.ac.cn

Reference

A wide-band, high-resolution semi-von Hamos spectrometer for K-shell multi-ionization atoms X-ray measurements

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