We have recently published a research paper titled: “Use of a Mylar filter to eliminate vacuum ultraviolet pulse pileup in low-energy x-ray measurements”[1]. This paper is published as part of the “Proceedings of the 24th Topical Conference on High-Temperature Plasma Diagnostics”, along with the papers mentioned in earlier PSS blog posts on the collisional-radiative model and the neutral atom density diagnostic.
This research builds on the investigation of measuring electron density and temperature by collecting plasma-emitted x rays using a diagnostic called the Silicon Drift Detector (SDD). The x rays emitted via Bremsstrahlung (German word for “breaking radiation”), can be mapped to a distribution that gives electron temperature and density. We observed changes to the x-ray spectra when changing the size of the aperture during experiments with the Rotating Magnetic Field (RMF), which was found to be connected to a phenomenon called “pulse pileup”. Essentially, pulse pileup means that too many x rays coming in at once can combine in energy and so skew the distribution that is measured — this would be misleading for temperature measurements, since they are connected to the slope of the distribution! To solve this issue, we decided to investigate the use of a Mylar filter, see below, because of its favorable filtering properties relevant to our experiment:
We performed calibration with an x-ray target tube and tested the filter with various plasma conditions for the PFRC-2. When running in a high-ultraviolet-flux mode of the PFRC-2 (with RMF) we found that the Mylar filter substantially reduced the low energy signal, which supports our hypothesis that the pulse pileup was causing x rays to be measured at higher energies. See the figure below for a striking comparison between no-Mylar and Mylar cases. The Mylar filter helps us eliminate pulse pileup effects and uncover the true x-ray distribution reaching the SDD for accurately measuring electron number density and temperature in the PFRC.
[1] Galea, Swanson, Cohen, and Thomas, Review of Scientific Instruments 93, 093531 (2022);
https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0101712