Determination of the Plasma Delay Time in PIPS detectors for fission fragments at the LOHENGRIN spectrometer

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Uppsala University, Box 516, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.
² European Commission, Joint Research Centre (JRC), 2440 Geel, Belgium.
³ Institut Laue-Langevin, 38042 Grenoble, France.
⁴ University of Edinburgh, EH9 3FD Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
⁵ University of Manchester, M13 9PL Manchester, United Kingdom.
⁶ Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP), Horia Hulubei National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH), 077125 Bucharest-Magurele, Romania.

^* e-mail: ana.gomez@physics.uu.se
^** e-mail: ali.al-adili@physics.uu.se

Published online: 26 May 2023

Abstract

The VElocity foR Direct particle Identification spectrometer (VERDI) is a 2E-2v fission spectrometer that allows the measurement of the total mass distribution of secondary fission fragments with a resolving power of 1-2 u. It consists of two time-of-flight (ToF) arms, with one Micro Channel Plate (MCP) detector and up to 32 Silicon PIPS (Passive Implanted Planar Silicon) detectors per arm. The MCPs provide the start timing signals and the PIPS detectors provide both the energy and the stopping ToF signals. In real conditions, the PIPS signals are affected by the formation of plasma from the interaction between the heavy ions and the detector material. The plasma contributes to a reduction in signal amplitude, resulting in a Pulse Height Defect (PHD), and introduces a signal delay, known as Plasma Delay Time (PDT). An experiment to characterize the PDT and PHD was performed at the LOHENGRIN recoil separator of the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL). Characteristic fission fragments from the 239Pu(n,f) reaction were separated based on their A/Q and E/Q ratios, allowing the measurement of a wide range of energies from 21 to 110 MeV and masses between 80 and 149 u. Six PIPS detectors were characterized to study their individual responses to the PDT and PHD effects. The signals were recorded in a digital acquisition system to completely exploit the offline analysis capabilities. Achieved combined timing and energy resolutions for fission fragments varied between 72(2) ps and 100(4) ps and 1.4% - 2% (FWHM), respectively. Preliminary PHD and PDT data are presented from the masses A=85, 95, 130 and 143. The PHD trends are strongly correlated with both the ion energy and mass. The PDT, on the other hand, shows a strong variation as a function of the ion kinetic energy but a smaller dependence on the ion mass.