Design and calibration of an elliptical crystal spectrometer for the diagnosis of proton-induced x-ray emission (PIXE)

Laser-driven proton-induced x-ray emission (laser-PIXE) is a nuclear analysis method based on the compact laser ion accelerator. Due to the transient process of ion acceleration, the laser-PIXE signals are usually spurted within nanoseconds and accompanied by strong electromagnetic pulses (EMP), so traditional multi-channel detectors are no longer applicable. In this work, we designed a reflective elliptical crystal spectrometer for the diagnosis of laser-PIXE. The device can detect the energy range of 1 keV-11 keV with a high resolution. A calibration experiment was completed on the electrostatic accelerator of Peking University using samples of Al, Ti, Cu, and ceramic artifacts. The detection efficiency of the elliptical crystal spectrometer was obtained in the order of 10-9.