Intense heavy ion beam-induced temperature effects in carbon-based stripper foils

At the future FAIR facility, reliably working solid carbon stripper foils are desired for providing intermediate charge states to SIS18. With the expected high beam intensities, the foils experience enhanced degradation and limited lifetime due to severe radiation damage, stress waves, and thermal effects. This work presents systematic measurements of the temperature of different carbon-based stripper foils (amorphous, diamond-like, and carbon-nanotube based) exposed to 4.8 MeV/u U, Bi, and Au beams of different pulse intensities. Thermal and spectroscopic analyses were performed by means of infrared thermography and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The resulting temperature depends on the foil thickness and strongly increases with increasing pulse intensity and repetition rate.