Time-of-flight – Energy spectrometer for elemental depth profiling – Jyväskylä design

A new time-of-flight elastic recoil detection spectrometer has been built, and initially the main effort was focused in getting good timing resolution and high detection efficiency for light elements. With the ready system, a 154 ps timing resolution was recorded for scattered 4.8 MeV ⁴He²⁺ ions. The hydrogen detection efficiency was from 80% to 20% for energies from 100 keV to 1 MeV, respectively, and this was achieved by having an additional atomic layer deposited Al₂O₃ coating on the first timing detector’s carbon foil. The data acquisition system utilizes an FPGA-card to time-stamp every time-of-flight and energy event with 25 ns resolution. The different origins of the background events in coincident time-of-flight-energy histograms have been studied and explained. The built system has proved to be able to routinely depth profile films thinner than 10 nm