The new external ion microbeam irradiation facility at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology organisation (ANSTO) Centre for Accelerator Science (CAS) is presented. The CAS Heavy Ion Microprobe on the 10 MV ANTARES accelerator was recently upgraded with an enclosed chamber in air at ambient temperature and pressure. The chamber is the first one in Australia dedicated to the testing of electronic components, particularly Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS), for space qualification with ion microbeams. Post commissioning, GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulation capabilities were established to evaluate the Linear Energy Transfer (LET) and dose rate profile for ions. Proton beams with energy up to 9 MeV were simulated while propagating through the chamber and the COTS chips of interest. The encapsulation was etched to a minimal thickness to allow ions penetration into the silicon sensitive volume. Irradiation with 9 MeV protons were performed on a large number of COTS, allowing the investigation of Total Ionizing Dose (TID) and Single Event Effects (SEE) were investigated. The facility, the GEANT4 simulation, the in-house readout system, and the preliminary results are discussed in this paper. Our latest etching capability for removal of the surface encapsulation is also presented, together with material characterisation of the samples by scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive spectroscopy.

The Centre for Accelerator Science at ANSTO operates four tandem accelerator systems for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) and Ion Beam Analysis (IBA). The latest addition to the fleet is SIRIUS, a 6MV combined IBA and AMS system. Following initial ion beam testing, conditioning and debugging software and hardware, SIRIUS is now commissioned. Details of the instrument design and performance data for 10Be, 26Al and 36Cl are presented.

The Centre for Accelerator Science facility at ANSTO has been expanded with the new NEC 6 MV "SIRIUS" accelerator system in 2015. In this paper we present a detailed description of the new nuclear microprobe-Confocal Heavy Ion Micro-Probe (CHIMP) together with results of the microprobe resolution testing and the elemental analysis performed on typical samples of mineral ore deposits and hyper-accumulating plants regularly measured at ANSTO.The CHIMP focusing and scanning systems are based on the OM-150 Oxford quadrupole triplet and the OM-26 separated scan-coil doublet configurations. A maximum ion rigidity of 38.9 amu-MeV was determined for the following nuclear microprobe configuration: the distance from object aperture to collimating slits of 5890 mm, the working distance of 165 mm and the lens bore diameter of 11 mm. The overall distance from the object to the image plane is 7138 mm.The CHIMP beamline has been tested with the 3 MeV H+ and 6 MeV He2+ ion beams. The settings of the object and collimating apertures have been optimized using the WinTRAX simulation code for calculation of the optimum acceptance settings in order to obtain the highest possible ion current for beam spot sizes of 1 mu m and 5 mu m. For optimized aperture settings of the CHIMP the beam brightness was measured to be similar to 0.9 pA mu m(-2) mrad(-2) for 3 MeV H+ ions, while the brightness of similar to 0.4 pA mu m(-2) mrad(-2) was measured for 6 MeV He2+ ions. The smallest beam sizes were achieved using a microbeam with reduced particle rate of 1000 Hz passing through the object slit apertures several micrometers wide. Under these conditions a spatial resolution of 0.6 mu m x 1.5 mu m for 3 MeV H+ and similar to 1.8 mu m x 1.8 mu m for 6 MeV He2+ microbeams in horizontal (and vertical) dimension has been achieved. The beam sizes were verified using STIM imaging on 2000 and 1000 mesh Cu electron microscope grids. (C) Crown Copyright 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Centre for Accelerator Science (CAS) facility at ANSTO has been expanded with a new 6MV tandem accelerator system supplied by the National Electrostatic Corporation (NEC). The beamlines, end-stations and data acquisition software for the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) were custom built by NEC for rare isotope mass spectrometry, while the beamlines with end-stations for the ion beam analysis (IBA) are largely custom designed at ANSTO. An overview of the 6MV system and its performance during testing and commissioning phase is given with emphasis on the IBA end-stations and their applications for materials modification and characterisation.