Diagnostic Tools For Low Intensity Ion Micro-Beams
P.Finocchiaroa*, L.Cosentinoa, A.Pappalardoa,
M.Vervaekeb, B.Volckaertsb, P.Vynckb, A.Hermanneb, H.Thienpontb
a) INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Via S.Sofia 44, 95125 Catania, Italy
b) Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Dept. of Applied Physics and Photonics, Pleinlaan 2,
1050 Brussels, Belgium
*) e-mail: finocchiaro@lns.infn.it, phone: +39.095.542.284, fax: +39.095.714.1815
Abstract. We have developed two techniques for microscopic ion beam imaging and profiling, both based on
scintillators, particularly suitable for applications in Deep Lithography with Protons (DLP) or with heavier
ions. The first one employs a scintillating fiberoptic plate and a CCD camera with suitable lenses, the second
makes use of a small scintillator optically coupled to a compact photomultiplier. We have proved the
possibility of spanning from single beam particles counting up to several nA currents. Both devices are
successfully being exploited for on-line control of low and very low intensity proton beams, down to a beam
size of less than 50µm.
samples shows. A better control of a micro-beam, by
means of a set of enhanced diagnostic tools, can thus
remarkably improve the Deep Lithography with
Protons (DLP).
INTRODUCTION
In the framework of the EXCYT radioactive beam
facility [1], currently under installation at INFN-LNS
Catania, we have developed several sensors suitable
for low intensity beam diagnostics [2]. Most of these
devices are based on scintillators, as they proved to be
rather robust and easy-to-use, and further providing a
considerable signal-to-noise ratio. As an extension of
these concepts and techniques, a natural improvement
of a few of them could allow reliable diagnostics of
micro-beams in diffferent application domains. A
remarkable application is the on-line micro-beam
tuning for Deep Lithography with Protons (DLP).
This recently developed technology allows to produce
several kinds of micro-opto mechanical structures like
micro-lens arrays, micro-prisms and mechanical
fiberholders with important applications in today's
optical data transfer and telecommunication [3, 4]. The
main purpose of DLP is to use a microscopic proton
beam to produce a controlled damage in PMMA
samples, which are later run through a selective
chemical treatment (etching or swelling) in order to
realize the needed micro-structures. It is rather evident
that controlling size and shape of the proton beam is
quite important, as the final check on the developed
THE µ-SFOP BEAM IMAGING SENSOR
This device is mainly meant to get live images of
the beam intensity distribution in the transverse plane.
To this purpose we employed a Scintillating Fiber
Optic Plate (SFOP), made from a bundle of Terbiumglass scintillating fibres, observed by a compact CCD
camera. Each fibre in the bundle is 10 µm in diameter,
while the overall plate size is 25x25x1.6 mm3. From a
practical point of view, we decided to perform these
first experiments in air, using a 10 MeV proton beam
accelerated at the LNS Tandem facility. Hereby we
separate the accelerator beam pipe, which is under
vacuum, from our setup by means of a 75 µm thin
Aluminum window. A first collimation stage, made
from an Aluminum block 12 cm long, has a 1 mm
square aperture. This insures an output beam size of
the order of 1 mm2, as compared to the input one
typically of several square millimeters; moreover, such
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gamma rays. X-rays are by far ruled out because of the
Nickel mask thickness, as comes out from a simple
evaluation of all the possible energy levels available
and the attenuation coefficient in Nickel. Gamma rays
are produced rather copiously by the proton beam,
both inside the Aluminum collimator and on the
Nickel mask. Such a gamma background has been
quite useful for the precision alignment between the
collimator and the mask: figures 2 and 3 show a pretty
good X alignment and a slight misalignment in the Y
direction, which has later been possible to compensate.
a collimator provides an output beam with a high
degree of parallelism (low divergence). The second,
and final, collimation stage is a lithographic Nickel
mask featuring an array of high precision round holes
of decreasing diameter from 1 mm to 20 µm. A
remotely controlled device allows to perform the
coarse and fine positioning of the mask in front of the
first collimator, in order to select a particular aperture
to be used for the irradiation. A second remotely
controlled stage allows to translate the PMMA sample
in the proton beam. Finally, the SFOP and its CCD
camera are installed in front of the beam. When the
beam impinges on the SFOP it produces scintillation
light, which is detected by the camera and displayed
on a computer screen by means of a frame grabber
device. In figure 1 we show a sample picture taken
with a primary beam current of 30 pA and a mask hole
of 150 µm (the current on the sensor was well below
1 pA).
25
Beam FWHM = 133 µm
Gamma FWHM = 1099 µm
Exp. Data
Fit
20
Beam
Gamma background
Noise background
15
10
5
0
0
500
1000
1500
2000
2500
3000
X [µm]
FIGURE 2. X profile of the previous beam spot. The
measured width is 133 µm for the beam spot and 1099 µm
for the gamma background (FWHM), in good agreement
with the collimator and mask apertures.
25
FIGURE 1. Live picture of a 30 pA proton beam after the
1 mm collimator and the lithographic mask while selecting a
150 µm aperture.
Beam FWHM = 139 µm
Gamma FWHM = 1264 µm
Exp. Data
Fit
20
The measured diameters in the X and Y directions
are 133 and 139 µm (FWHM), as can be seen in
figures 2 and 3, even though a wider bell-shaped
background signal is evident. The width of such a
distribution is about 1 mm, which is consistent with
the 1 mm Aluminum collimator aperture. This
background, clearly correlated to the beam, can only
be ascribed to protons or photons. As for protons, they
should be totally stopped inside the mask. But due to
some energy spread and non-uniformities in the mask
itself, we cannot completely exclude that a small
fraction of the 1 mm beam, sitting in the tail of the
Bragg’s peak, was able to reach across the mask and
hit the SFOP. We think this is very unlikely, however
finer measurements of the involved thicknesses and
additional tests are under way. Our opinion is that the
wider signal comes from photons. We remark that the
SFOP is also sensitive to photons, namely X and
Beam
Gamma background
Noise background
15
10
5
0
0
500
1000
1500
2000
Y [µm]
FIGURE 3. Y profile of the previous beam spot. The
measured width is 139 µm for the beam spot and 1264 µm
for the gamma background (FWHM), in good agreement
with the collimator and mask apertures.
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THE µ-SBBS BEAM SENSOR
proper threshold setting is sensitive to the beam
particles and blind to the background radiation pulses.
With a fixed primary beam current we selected several
different intensities by using different mask apertures,
and then counted the number of detected protons in 20
seconds. The beam stopper in front of the scintillator
was removed for these integral measurements, and the
sensor was positioned in front of the collimator hole.
Figure 6 shows the count rate as a function of the
square of the collimator diameter, that is expected to
be roughly proportional to the beam current emerging
from the collimator itself and hitting the sensor.
XY Profile Reconstruction
The µ-SBBS (Scintillator Based Beam Sensor)
device is meant to reconstruct the x and y beam
profiles in the transverse plane. It basically consists of
a 1x1x0.2 cm3 CsI(Tl) scintillator optically coupled to
a compact photomultiplier (Hamamatsu 5774) by
means of a prism-shaped lightguide. In front of the
scintillator we fixed an aluminum beam stopper with
two sharp edges perpendicular to each other, as shown
in figure 4. The output signal from the photomultiplier
is handled by an I-V converter, which converts the
anodic current into a more friendly voltage signal that
is fed into an ADC. At the same time the I-V converter
provides the unperturbed pulse output, useful in case
of single particle counting. A 1D scan of the beam
with this device, by means of a high precision
translation stage, provides incremental information
about the fraction of beam stopped by the aluminum.
The derivative of the measured function, after suitably
scaling the translation axis by cos(450), represents the
intensity profile along the x and y directions in the
transverse plane, as shown in figure 5.
1400
Beam scan data
1200
I(x) [a.u]
1000
800
600
400
200
0
Profiles
gaussian fits
1200
800
Y
400
0
X
-400
-800
a
-1200
1500
2000
2500
3000
Translation direction [µm]
b
c
3500
FIGURE 5. X and Y beam intensity profiles as measured
with the µ-SBBS beam sensor. Upper part: the raw data;
lower part: the derivative represents the X and Y profiles.
d
10000
9000
8000
Figure 4. The µ-SBBS sensor. a) prism-shaped lightguide; b)
CsI(Tl) scintillator; c) beam stopper; d) photomultiplier.
7000
6000
5000
4000
Measuring Ultra-Low Beam Currents
3000
2000
The µ-SBBS has also been used for single beam
particle counting, as each proton impinging on the
scintillator produces a characteristic scintillation pulse.
As long as the beam rate is well below the inverse of
the decay time of CsI(Tl) (i.e. ≈1 µs, beam rate below
105 particles per second) a discriminator with the
1000
0
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
Collimator area [mm^2]
FIGURE 6. Proton count rate on µ-SBBS as a function of
the square of the beam diameter.
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push the components’ specifications further to the
ultimate physical limits. In addition, we have planned
-as a continuation of this LNS-VUB collaboration - to
exploit Deep Lithography with Ions in order to
produce micro-opto mechanical structures with much
higher aspect ratios [5].
DISCUSSION
Our results tell us that a beam of intensity several
tens of fA (≈105 particles per second) and a few tens
µm width can be imaged on-line using the nearly offthe-shelf µ-SFOP sensor. We have also proved that
such a device is truly interactive, indeed during our
tests its display screen was installed on the accelerator
console in order to help the operators. While in most
cases the standard accelerator equipment was unable to
sense any beam, the 8-bit frame grabber reading out
the µ-SFOP was often close to saturation because of
the large amount of scintillation light produced by the
sensor. Moreover, the short decay time of the
Terbium-glass light, about 3 ms, produces no
appreciable afterglow: this means that even fast beam
fluctuations, in terms of intensity, position, shape or
size, can be observed on-line. To prove this we have
also recorded digital movies while moving the mask
up and down in front of the beam, showing the
different holes sliding in and out on the display in real
time. Concerning the µ-SBBS we have to admit that
even though it is very sensitive and powerful, it has
been to some extent overruled by the µ-SFOP with
respect to beam profiling: the latter showed to be
surprisingly more sensitive than expected. However,
should a space resolution below 20 µm be needed, µSBBS with a high precision beam stopper could be a
better solution. On the other hand µ-SBBS has shown
to be a friendly and reliable device to measure the
deposited dose: it can count the beam particles one by
one at very low intensity, and at the same time it
provides a DC output signal which can be used for its
absolute self-calibration versus the count rate. At
higher beam intensity only the DC output is
meaningful, and its absolute calibration still holds.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful to L.Calabretta, D.Rifuggiato and
the Accelerator Division staff of LNS for having
delivered us a useful proton beam under a wide set of
intensity conditions. We would also like to explicitly
thank A.Amato for his useful suggestions about
electronic noise and the related shielding.
REFERENCES
1. G.Ciavola et al., Nucl.Phys. A 616(1997)69c
2. S.Cappello, L.Cosentino, P.Finocchiaro, Nucl. Instr. &
Meth. A 479(2002)243
L.Cosentino, P.Finocchiaro, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci.
Vol.48, No.4, (2001)1132
P.Finocchiaro et al., Nucl. Instr. & Meth.A 437(1999)552
P.Finocchiaro, Proc. of the 15th International
Conference on the Application of Accelerators in
Research and Industry, 4-7 November 1998, Denton,
Texas, USA
3. H. Thienpont et al, IEEE, Vol.88, No. 6, pp. 769-779,
June 2000.
4. B. Volckaerts et al., Asian Journal of Physics, Vol. 10,
No. 2, (2001)195
B. Volckaerts, et al, Proc. International conference on
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CONCLUSIONS
5. B.Volckaerts, P.Vynck, M.Vervaeke, L.Cosentino,
P.Finocchiaro, A.Hermanne, H.Thienpont, Experiment
proposal submitted to the INFN-LNS PAC, September
2002, unpublished.
This work confirms once again the high reliability
and flexibility of scintillators and their associated
techniques. The two sensors we developed proved
quite useful for Deep Lithography with Protons, as
they allow microscopic ion beam imaging and
profiling. We demonstrated that these sensors can span
from single beam particles counting up to several nA
currents. Both devices can be successfully used for online control of proton beams, down to a beam size of
less than 50 µm. Their surprisingly good performance
makes them suitable candidates for any other
application where ion micro-beams are involved. In
particular, we are implementing these monitoring
devices in our DLP irradiation set-up at the VUB, to
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