Dresden 2013 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 49: Instrumentation

HK 49.3: Talk

Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 17:15–17:30, WIL-C207

Optimization of Atomic Beam Sources for Polarization Experiments — •Martin Gaisser, Alexander Nass, and Hans Ströher — IKP, Forschungszentrum Jülich

For experiments with spin-polarized protons and neutrons a dense target is required. In current atomic beam sources an atomic hydrogen or deuterium beam is expanded through a cold nozzle and a system of sextupole magnets and RF-transition units selects a certain hyperfine state. The achievable flux seems to be limited to about 10¹⁷ particles per second with a high nuclear polarization. A lot of experimental and theoretical effort has been undertaken to understand all effects and to increase the flux. However, improvements have remained marginal. Now, a Monte Carlo simulation based on the DSMC part of the open source C++ library OpenFOAM is set up in order to get a better understanding of the flow and to optimize the various elements. It is intended to include important effects like deflection from magnetic fields, recombination on the walls and spin exchange collisions in the simulation and make quantitative predictions of changes in the experimental setup. The goal is to get a tool that helps to further increase the output of an atomic beam source. So far, a new binary collision model, magnetic fields, RF-transition units and a tool to measure the collision age are included. The next step will be to couple the whole simulation with an optimization algorithm implementing Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA) in order to automatically optimize the atomic beam source.