Thomson parabola time-of-flight ion spectrometer.

A novel type of ion spectrometer for laser-produced plasma diagnostics is described. The Thomson parabola configuration is used to separate the expanding plasma ions according to their different charge-to-mass ratios. One particular ion species is subsequently collected by a parabola-shaped charge collector. In this way ion velocity distributions of a single charge-to-mass ratio are obtained through simple time-of-flight analysis. Measured ion energies can be as low as 1 keV per nucleon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]