High Intensity High Energy E-Beam Interacting with A Thin Solid State Target: First Results at AIRIX

AIRIX is a 2 kA, 20 MeV, 60 ns linear accelerator dedicated to X-ray flash radiography. During a regular running phase, the primary electron beam is accelerated to and focused on a high atomic number target in order to generate X-rays by bremβtrahlung mainly. The huge energy density deposited into the material is such that temperature rises up to 15000° K and that clusters and particles are violently ejected from the surface. In that mechanism, the backward emission speed can reach 5 km s -1 and the debris can gradually accumulate and subsequently contaminate some sensitive parts of the machine. In order to protect the whole accelerating line from the detrimental effect of back-ejected particles, we have investigated the technical feasibility of a thin foil implementation upstream the X-ray converter.