Measurement of RFT-30 Cyclotron Proton Beam Energy

RFT-30 cyclotron has been developed for not only the production of radioisotopes (RIs) and their applications, but also proton beam utilization to various research fields including material science, bio science, and so on. RFT-30 Cyclotron has been designed in which proton beam energy can be controlled from 15 to 30 MeV by adjusting the position of a stripper carbon foil, which steals two electrons from accelerated negative hydrogen ions, and therefore results in the conversion of negative hydrogen ions to protons. In this research, we performed the energy measurement of the proton beam from RFT-30 cyclotron by means of the stacked foil technique. Stacked Cu foils were irradiated by the proton beam, and then each foil's radioactivity, which resulted from 65Zn produced from 65Cu atoms via 65Cu(p, n)65Zn reaction, was measured. Measured beam energy can be useful information for the accurate estimation of the radioactivity when producing RIs. In this research, the proton beam energy of RFT-30 cyclotron was measured for the first time using a simple stacked foil method. Before the measurement it was assumed to be 28.4 MeV, but it was proved that the actual proton beam energy was 29.45 MeV.