6/21/2019 BNL | NSRL User Guide

NSRL User Guide

User Guide Contents

III. Technical Data  User Guide Home

I. Beamline Hardware
Bragg Curves and Peaks Sample Holders
Collimators
Remote Sample Flipper
Bragg Curves Remote Translation Table
Remote Rotation Table
Charged particles, such as protons and heavy ions, lose energy when Rail System
passing through material primarily through ionization. The Bethe-Bloch Incubators
equation describes that energy loss. The Bragg Curve is a graph of the Data Acquisition System
energy loss rate, or Linear Energy Transfer (LET) as a function of the Binary Filter
distance through a stopping medium. The energy loss is characterized Mini Pixel and Large Pixel
Chamber
primarily by the square of the nuclear charge, Z, and the inverse
square of the projectile velocity, β. This gives the Bragg Curve its
familiar shape, peaking at very low energies, just before the projectile II. Operations
stops. It is this Bragg Peak that makes ion therapy advantageous over Galactic Cosmic Ray
X-ray treatment for cancer. The Bragg Curve falls with increasing Simulation (GCRSim)
energy until a minimum is reached near a velocity of β = 0.9, about 2.2 Simplified Galactic Cosmic
Ray Simulation
GeV for protons. LET increases slowly, rising logarithmically for (SimGCRSim)
energies above the minimum. Solar Particle Event
Simulation (SPESim)
At the beginning of each day, the kinetic energy of the NSRL Beam is Stacking Samples
Target Room Exposure
measured using the Bragg Peak. High density polyethylene (HDPE, ρ =
Levels
0.97 g/cm3) is used to slow down and stop the beam particles. An array Calculating Target Room
of HDPE, called the binary filter, ranging in thickness from 16 cm down access time
to 250 microns can be remotely inserted into the beam. The LET is Activation decay times
measured with a pair of ion chambers, one upstream and one
downstream of the binary filter. The plot of the ratio, downstream over III. Technical Data
upstream, shows how the relative LET changes as a function of the Beam characterization
amount of material in the beam. A typical Bragg peak for 205 MeV studies
Protons is shown below. Beam ion species and
energies
Beam uniformity and profile
Beam fragmentation
Time structure in beam
Dosimetry Calibration
Bragg curves/peaks
LET-range plots
Material in the Beam

IV. Life in the Beam

https://www.bnl.gov/nsrl/userguide/bragg-curves-and-peaks.php 1/4
6/21/2019 BNL | NSRL User Guide

A Cell Phone's Life in the

Beam
A Microphone's Life in the
Beam

 Tech Notes

Figure 1: Bragg Curve for 205 MeV protons. Range in HDPE is 26.100 cm where
the peak of the curve occurs. The LET at the entrance point is 0.4457 keV/micron in
water.

A Bragg Curve for 290 MeV/n Carbon is shown below. For heavy ions,
it is possible to break up the nucleus as it passes through the degrader.
The nuclear fragments all have lower Z than the primary, so they will in
general have a longer range. This produces a tail to the Bragg Curve
that is not evident in the proton plot above.

Figure 2: Bragg curve for 292.7 MeV/n Carbon ions. Range is 15.950 cm in HDPE.
LET on entrance is 24.33 keV/micron in water. For degrader thicknesses beyond the
Bragg Peak, 16 cm, you can see the tail produced by low-Z fragments.

When the primary ion of high-Z breaks up, it results in several low-Z
fragments, each of which deposits small amounts of energy in the
material. The sum total of all the energy deposited by all fragments can
never add up to the energy deposited by the primary ion. This causes
the Bragg Curve for fragmenting high-Z ions like Iron to drop initially.
The interplay between increasing LET as the ion slows down, and
decreasing LET as the ion fragments can work together to produce
either a net loss or a net gain in total LET. In the figure below, for 1
GeV/n Iron ions, the losses from fragmentation exceed the gains from
slowing down.

https://www.bnl.gov/nsrl/userguide/bragg-curves-and-peaks.php 2/4
6/21/2019 BNL | NSRL User Guide

Figure 3: Bragg Curve for 962.8 MeV/n Iron ions. Range is 24.850 cm in HDPE, for
an LET in water of 151.6 keV/micron. The initial drop in LET is due to the
fragmentation of the Iron nuclei. The subsequent rise near 25 cm is due to the
slowing down of the Iron ions. Note the substantial tail due to all the penetrating
fragments out beyond the Bragg Peak.

For some low-LET beams, the amount of material required to stop the
beam particles is too great and this measurement is not possible.

Of the several ways used to determine the kinetic energy of the beam
and the associated LET, the most routine measurement is performed
by measuring the Bragg peak. The relative LET is measured using the
secondary ion chambers as greater and greater thicknesses of high
density polyethylene are inserted into the path of the beam. When a
critical thickness is reached, the beam particles will slow down enough
in the polyethylene to stop in the ion chamber, giving a peak in the
observed LET. From the location of the stopping peak, we derive the
kinetic energy of the beam, and the LET that a beam of that kinetic
energy would deposit in either water (for biology users) or silicon (for
SEE users).

Bragg Peak Measurements at NSRL

We have accumulated Bragg Peak measurements for the following Ion
species Click on the name to link to an EXCEL spreadsheet
containing the data on range, energy loss, LET and spectra.

Hydrogen (55, 103, 205 and 250 MeV)

Helium (250 MeV/n)
Carbon (200, 293 MeV/n)
Oxygen (284, 600 MeV/n)
Silicon (208, 305, 381, 403, 598, 834, 977 MeV/n)
Chlorine (501, 531 MeV/n)
Titanium (978 MeV/n)
Iron (89, 114, 151, 263, 306, 585, 598, 963 MeV/n)
Krypton (261 MeV/n)

https://www.bnl.gov/nsrl/userguide/bragg-curves-and-peaks.php 3/4
6/21/2019 BNL | NSRL User Guide

Xenon (273 MeV/n)

Gold (160 MeV/n)

https://www.bnl.gov/nsrl/userguide/bragg-curves-and-peaks.php 4/4