NOTICE
Ion species availability is limited until maintenance on the EBIS ion source concludes in mid 2025. Contact NSRL staff for information and updates.
Please refer to the beam availability page for the list of current library beams.
The ion sources that supply NSRL can provide a multitude of elements that span the periodic table, from hydrogen at the lightest to bismuth at the heaviest. They can be accelerated by the “Booster” synchrotron and delivered to NSRL with energies up to around 1000 MeV per nucleon (MeV/u) for elements lighter than iron or about 500 MeV/u for elements heavier than iron.
The elements on the periodic table below have been colored according to whether they currently are or have previously been available for use by experimenters at NSRL.
Elements colored green are sourced from the “Electron Beam Ion Source” (EBIS) and are trivially available at all times without prior notice unless stated otherwise.
Protons are produced by one of two other ion source machines, which have their own operating schedules. While protons are frequently used at NSRL, their use does require prior notice and is contingent on one of the proton sources being online.
Noble gasses—denoted in yellow—also use EBIS but require a different injection mechanism within the source machine, so their availability also isn’t guaranteed without prior notice. Operations with noble gasses heavier than neon require manual intervention by ion source personnel, so their use is discouraged unless there is a compelling reason to do so.
For highly specialized experiments requiring ions that cannot be produced in EBIS, such as those requiring the use of deuterons (2H), the BNL Tandem Van de Graaff source (“The Tandem”) must be used. These ions have been colored pink in the chart above.
Full Ion & Energy Capabilities
The maximum energy to which an ion can be accelerated depends on many factors, but is generally gets lower as the ion’s mass gets larger.
The table below shows all currently available ion species with their corresponding maximum energies. The table also shows the surface linear energy transfer (LET) and range in silicon for each ion at its maximum energy, as well as the peak LET in silicon that the ion will achieve as it slows down. Note that the peak LET depends only on the ion species and is independent of starting energy.
Numbers in parentheses and colored green indicate ions which can be produced at a different charge state1 within the ion source machine. They can be accelerated to higher energies at the cost of greatly reduced maximum intensity.
| Ion Species | Maximum Energy [MeV/u] | LET in Si at Maximum Energy [MeV-cm²/mg] | Peak LET in Si [MeV-cm²/mg] | Range in Si [mm] |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1H | 2500 | 0.001665 | 0.48 | 5580 |
| D (2H) | 1125 | 0.001764 | 0.48 | 4079 |
| 4He | 1500 | 0.006799 | 1.5 | 2963 |
| 12C | 1500 | 0.0593 | 5.1 | 1020 |
| 16O | 1500 | 0.1074 | 7.2 | 749 |
| 20Ne | 1000 | 0.177 | 9.0 | 351 |
| 28Si | 1000 | 0.351 | 14.0 | 247 |
| 40Ar | 1000 | 0.600 | 18.7 | 207 |
| 48Ti | 1000 | 0.854 | 24.3 | 175 |
| 56Fe | 1000 | 1.189 | 29.4 | 146 |
| 84Kr | 383 (721) | 3.26 (2.54) | 41.0 | 26.9 (70.4) |
| 93Nb | 520 | 3.64 | 47.5 | 37.5 |
| 107Ag | 575 | 4.66 | 59.4 | 37.9 |
| 127I | 448 | 6.55 | 68.9 | 24.2 |
| 129Xe | 350 (589) | 7.67 (6.16) | 69.3 | 16.1 (35.8) |
| 159Tb | 446 | 9.32 | 78.2 | 21.4 |
| 181Ta | 390 (475) | 12.7 (11.7) | 87.7 | 15.6 (21.1) |
| 197Au | 242 (425) | 19.2 (14.7) | 94.4 | 6.9 (16.4) |
| 209Bi | 385 | 17.0 | 100.0 | 13.5 |
Beams can be tuned to any energy from as low as about 50 MeV/u up to an ion’s maximum energy. That said arbitrary intermediate energies are generally not achieved by tuning new, bespoke beams for experimenters without good reason. Instead, base energies are selected from the Single Event Effects library after which they are further fine-tuned with degraders.
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- Note that this charge state refers to the ions when they are first produced in the ion source machine. Ions are delivered to NSRL fully stripped of their electrons. ↩︎
