Polarized Deuteron Source for the Electrostatic Accelerator

Publications, 29 June 2023

We offer to your attention a preprint “Research and Development of the Polarized Deuteron Source for the Electrostatic Accelerator” E13-2023-12 issued by the JINR Publishing Department. The authors are FLNP JINR researchers Ilya Gapienko, Dmitriy Belov, Andrey Fedorov, Grigory Gurevich (FLNP JINR, INR RAS), Yuri Plis, Yuri Usov.

The prototype of a polarized deuteron source was made for the Van de Graaff accelerator of the Czech Technical University in Prague with the aim of creating a full-scale setup for producing a polarized neutron beam for experiments on measuring ΔσL and ΔσT, longitudinal and transverse spin asymmetries in transmission of a polarized neutron beam through a frozen polarized deuteron target. The method is based on Kaminsky’s experiment on channeling deuterons through a magnetized single-crystal Ni foil 1−2 μm thick. It is proposed to use the reaction T(d, n)4He with polarized deuterons of an energy of 150−200 keV. For a nonchanneled beam (the goniometer in a random position), the tensor polarization measurements were carried out with a TiT target. Our result is Pzz = −0.10 ± 0.02. This indicates that the deuterium atoms that have passed outside the channels also become polarized due to the capture of polarized electrons from the nickel crystal.

The study has been performed at the Dzhelepov Laboratory of Nuclear Problems, JINR, and sent to the journal “Particles and Nuclei, Letters”.