Monitoring relativistic heavy ion beams at the Bevalac

Beam fluence in high intensity proton and electron accelerators is usually measured with Secondary Emission Monitors(SEM) calibrated by an activation method. There were no such activation measurements available for relativistic heavy ion beams. Secondary electron production and energy loss of a charged particle in passing through material are a result of Coulomb interaction between the projectile field and electrons in the material. Therefore range measurements and secondary emission yield should follow the same functional relationship of velocity and charge as given by the Bethe-Block equation. A substantial amount of data on range in water for various ions has been collected at the Bevalac Biomedical facility. Using the same calculations that convert measured proton ranges to ion ranges and comparing the calculated values to measured values, provides an indirect way to verify the validity of the SEM calibration. The results of these measurements are discussed in this paper