Performance Tests of a Short Faraday Cup Designed for HIE-ISOLDE

The On-Line Isotope Mass Separator (ISOLDE) facility at CERN is being upgraded in order to deliver higher energy and intensity radioactive beams. The final setup will consist in replacing the energy variable part of the normal conducting REX post-accelerator with superconducting cavities. In order to preserve the beam emittance, the drift space between the cryomodules housing these cavities has been kept to a minimum. As a consequence, the longitudinal space available for beam diagnostics is severely limited in the inter-cryomodule regions. A Faraday cup (FC) will be installed to measure beam currents, and due to the tight spatial constraints, its length is much smaller than usual. This poses a great challenge when trying to avoid the escape of ion-induced secondary electrons, which would falsify the current measurement. Two prototypes of such a short FC have therefore been tested at REX-ISOLDE using several beam intensities and energies, with the aim of determining its accuracy. In this paper the experimental results obtained for the two prototype cups are presented together with numerical calculations of the electrostatic fields that are produced inside the cup.