Instrumentation for time-of-flight elastic recoil detection analysis

Time-of-flight elastic recoil detection is an ion beam based method to analyze the elemental composition of thin film samples at different depths. In order to improve the mass resolution and to enable kinematic correction a position sensitive gas ionization chamber energy detector was constructed. This detector along with pre-existing timing detectors were connected to a modern fully digitizing data acquisition setup. This thesis describes the design of these instruments, including all aspects from the mechanical design of the gas ionization detector to the algorithm and software development of the digitizing acquisition setup. The performance of the system has been studied with measurements and Monte Carlo simulations. New methods to study the data acquisition and instrumentation related effects are introduced and these methods are extended to study a proposed low energy time- of-flight ERDA instrument design.