Calibration of CR-39 solid state track detectors with monoenergetic protons from 0.3 MeV to 2.5 MeV

¹ Department of Nuclear Physics, China Institute of Atomic Energy, Beijing 102413, China
² School of Physics and Space Sciences, China West Normal University, Nanchong 637002, China
³ College of Nuclear Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
⁴ School of Physics and Information Engineering, Shanxi Normal University, Linfen 041004, China

^* These authors contributed equally to this work.
^** Corresponding author: guobing@ciae.ac.cn

Published online: 30 September 2020

Abstract

The ²H(d,p)³H reaction is one of the most crucial reactions in the Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). It is of particular interest to investigate this kind of reactions in plasma environments, generated by high intensity lasers, which are similar to real astrophysical conditions. We have experimentally investigated the ²H(d,p)³H reaction using laser-driven counter-streaming collisionless plasmas at the Shenguang-II laser facility. CR-39 track detectors are widely employed as the main diagnostics in such experiments and laser-driven ion acceleration. In this work, we performed calibration of CR-39 track detectors with monoenergetic protons from the tandem accelerator, and then presented their track diameters for proton energies ranging from 300 keV to 2.5 MeV and for etching times between 4 and 28 hours. In addition, we recommended the optimal etching time at the typical etching conditions, which will be very useful for the following massive data analysis from the CR-39 detectors.