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MATERIAL WITNESS

Stripping ions with liquid

Nature Materials volume 21, page 729 (2022)Cite this article

The efficiency with which these ions are accelerated by electrical fields to produce high-energy beams can be increased by removing more electrons from them using ‘charge strippers’, which can increase the (positive) ion charge to several tens of the electron charge. That has traditionally been done using thin foils of graphitic carbon through which the beams pass. As one might imagine, passing a fast beam of heavy ions through the material quickly damages it, and so the stripper foils don’t last long. The energy deposited increases with the mass of the ions, so that, for example, a beam of uranium ions is hard to strip to high degrees of charge. For such a beam, the carbon foils currently used at the Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF) at RIKEN’s Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science in Saitama, Japan would last barely six hours if faced with the high beam flux of the FRIB: an impractically short lifetime.

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    Philip Ball

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Correspondence to Philip Ball.

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Ball, P. Stripping ions with liquid. Nat. Mater. 21, 729 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-022-01307-0

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