STFC/RAL/ISIS, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon
The gas ionisation beam profile monitor is a well established piece of diagnostic hardware. The use of active devices such as micro-channel plates (MCP’s) and channeltrons within such a diagnostic can present problems with gain differences between channels. At the Rutherford Appleton laboratory we have produced a beam profile monitor that uses an array of 40 individually powered channeltrons; these devices were chosen over the MCP for their robustness and longer lifetimes. These channeltron devices (like MCP’s across their surface) can suffer from large variations in gain at the desired operating voltage. We have successfully shown that an additional in-built calibration system using a single, motorised , channeltron can overcome these issues. We report on the work to build the calibration system, and the 40 channeltron array. The PXI (National Instruments) system used to control the motor drive and provide the all data acquisition is also covered. Also we report the new high voltage drift field to reduce space charge effects on the beam profile. Ongoing work on understanding how the drift field as well the beam field affects the measured profile is also discussed.
