Automated reconstruction of the initial distribution of laser accelerated ion beams from radiochromic film (RCF) stacks

Abstract

Radiochromic film (RCF) stacks are the most commonly used diagnostic of laser accelerated ion beams at Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt (GSI) and at other laboratories. So far, the evaluation of the stacks is performed using manual input for the deposited energy determination. This is usually a tedious task and introduces uncertainty in the resulting ion energy spectrum and also in the corresponding angular distribution. An automated procedure is especially important if larger data sets, containing multiple laser shots, are investigated. Here, we describe an automated procedure for the evaluation of digitized RCF stacks. RCF stacks obtained at GSI’s PHELIX laser system are evaluated as a test case. A validation of parts of the procedure is performed on generated input data.