Modification of the current integrator used for radioactive ion beam measurements at ISOLDE

At ISOLDE (Isotope Separator On Line DEvice), nuclear reactions are produced in different targets bombarded by a pulsed beam of protons with an energy of 1.4 GeV and an average intensity up to 2 µA. The electrically neutral chemical species produced from such nuclear reactions are then extracted from the target and ionized afterwards in order to be accelerated by an electric field and separated by a magnetic field depending on the mass and the number of protons of those newly produced nuclei. Intensity, which corresponds to a flow of electric charges per unit time, is a physical quantity that fits well the description of such phenomena and is used to characterize these accelerated nuclei that we usually call Radioactive Ion Beams (RIBs). RIBs intensities are measured by pico-amperemeters that communicate directly with LabVIEW, in which we can manipulate the acquired data in order to make some statistics, signal processing, graphs, or write them to files. The aim of this summer project was to implement some instruction stages in such a way as to facilitate the use of the previous current integrator, and also in order to allow the automatic writing of data in a text or excel file and to be able to write useful information such as comments or the name of the user performing the experiment.