PISA – an Experiment for Fragment Spectroscopy at the Internal Beam of COSY: Application of an Axial Ionization Chamber

The Proton-Induced SpAllation (PISA) experiment performed at the internal beam facility of the COSY storage ring in Jülich, Germany, which is aimed at the precise measurement of double differential cross-sections over a broad range of energies and angles for spallation reactions induced by protons of 200–2500MeV energy in various targets, is presented. In this paper the emphasis is put on the design, principles of operation and performance of a Bragg Curve Detector (BCD) optimized for internal beam experiments at storage rings. Very clean and distinct product identification (with Z up to ∼14) from reactions, in which a Ni target was bombarded with a 1.9GeV circulating proton beam, is obtained. The individual elements are resolved for emission energies higher than 0.5MeV/nucleon. Moreover, due to the detector read-out achieved by coupling a specially designed current sensitive preamplifier directly to a sampling ADC, the shape analysis of the signals from the BCD allows the isotope identification of light particles with A up to ∼11. It is also found that the BCD can be used efficiently as a thin ΔE detector for the telescope consisting of the BCD and a series of silicon detectors.