Focused microbeam single event with a scintillating foil trigger and magnetic blanking

Abstract The focused proton microbeam of the Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, Italy has been upgraded to perform “Single Event (SE) physics”. For this, a trigger, which recognizes the crossing of a single proton, and a beam blanking system have been implemented. The trigger consists of the light signal coming from a scintillating plastic blade and read by a pair of photomultipliers, while the beam deflection is induced by a magnetic raster system, usually employed in elemental mapping. In spite of its slowness, this last device proves suitable, due to the extremely low particle rate we were able to achieve. Early tests are described here, during which regular matrices of etched nuclear tracks were produced on polymer CR39 foils. Althought, as far as efficiency and spot size are concerned, performance is still far from being satisfactory, we believe this procedure for SE studies to be practicable.