CLPU, Villamayor, Spain
Laser-plasma driven accelerators have become reliable sources of low-emittance, broadband and multi-species ion sources, with cut-off energies above the MeV-level*. We report on the development, construction, and experimental test of an angle resolved Thomson parabola spectrometer for laser-accelerated multi-MeV ion beams able to distinguish between ionic species with different q/m ratio. The angular resolving power, which is achieved due to an array of entrance pinholes, can be simply adjusted by modifying the geometry of the experiment and/or the pinhole array itself. The analysis procedure allows for different ion traces to cross on the detector plane, which greatly enhances the flexibility and capabilities of the detector. A full characterization of the TP magnetic field has been implemented into a relativistic code developed for the trajectory calculation of each beamlet. High repetition rate compatibility is guaranteed by the use of a MCP as active particle detector. We describe the first test of the spectrometer at the 1PW VEGA 3 laser facility at CLPU, Salamanca (Spain), where up to 15MeV protons and carbon ions from a 3-micron laser-irradiated metallic foil are detected**.
*A. Macchi et. al., Rev. Mod. Phys. 85, 751 (2013)
**C. Salgado et. al., Sensors 22, 3239 (2022).
