Upgrades to the Atomki-ICA Funded through Europlanet 2024 RI
As well as offering Transnational Access (TA) to laboratory facilities and field sites, the Europlanet 2024 Research Infrastructure (RI) project is funding the upgrade of six facilities to provide new capabilities for planetary research.
The first of these upgrades – the installation of an ion beam facility for irradiating planetary ice analogues at Atomki-ICA in Debrecen – was made fully operational in early 2020. The facility was included in the first two TA Calls and two visits have already taken place.
The upgrades carried out to date include:
- The accelerator beam line at Atomki Tandetron facility has been developed for depositing close-to-uniform density ion beams onto the target surface, covering the whole infrared-visible area. The beamline now contains the necessary position and size defining elements, scanning electrodes and electronics and a set of Faraday cups.
- The Atomki-ICA facility has been equipped with a new quad sample holder, which makes it possible to deposit identical ice-layers non-directionally in one step, and irradiate them with different ion-beams, varying e.g. the energies, current densities, or even the ion species in one cooling/heating cycle. A new temperature sensor has also been added to the control system.
- The chamber has been equipped with a 2-2000 eV Kimball electron gun, for off-line electron irradiation measurements.
- The chamber has been equipped with a quadrupole mass spectrometer (QMS-200), for monitoring the background gases, the deposition process, and the sputtered species during irradiation.
- All procedures and functions (deposition, ion irradiation, electron irradiation, temperature-programmed desorption) have been tested and proved to be reliable. A substrate preparation method has been developed for avoiding sparks in high current-density measurements.
In 2021, some further technical developments will be undertaken and the full upgrade of Atomki-ICA is expected to be completed by February 2022. A second, complimentary, low-energy ion facility based on an electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) source will be opened to Europlanet 2024 RI TA users in 2022.
More about the Atomki-ICA facility.
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Back to Europlanet 2024 RI homepage.
