Microchannel Plate Position Sensitive Detector System for Charge Analysis of Low Energy Heavy Ions

A position sensitive detector (PSD) using a microchannel plate (MCP) of rectangular shape (46 mm × 13 mm) is developed and applied to measure the charge spectrum of low energy heavy ions. An analog position processor with a swift log-antilog operation is devised, which has a wide dynamic range of 50 mV–10 V suitable for the MCP pulse properties. A digital processor employing two 8 K channel ADC's and a minicomputer is also presented for comparison. The well resolved spectra are obtained when multiply charged heavy ions are separately and locally incident on the PSD.