Indigenous facility development for studying an elementary radiation process: atomic-field Bremsstrahlung

An indigenous setup for studying the process of atomic-field Bremsstrahlung produced from the interaction of keV electrons with a solid or a gaseous target has been developed and described. The setup consists of a high-vacuum scattering chamber, a home-built keV electron gun with a replaceable tungsten filament cathode, an isolated floating high-voltage control unit, signal processing electronic modules and a data-acquisition system comprising of an IBM PC/XT 4-K multichannel analyser. The performance of the setup has been tested and used for accumulating data for Bremsstrahlung spectra from 7.0 keV electrons incident on thin Ag and Au targets. These spectra have been analyzed and discussed in light of the semiclassical and the quantum calculations. The agreement between experiment and theory is found to be satisfactory within the experimental uncertainty of the measurements. (author). 10 refs., 5 figs., 1 tab