Technique for increasing dynamic range of space-borne ion composition instruments

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The dynamic range of ion composition spectrometers is limited by several factors, including saturation of particle counters and spillover of signals from highly dominant species into channels tuned to minor species. Instruments designed for composition measurements of hot plasmas in space can suffer greatly from both of these problems because of the wide energy range required and the wide disparity in fluxes encountered in various regions of interest. In order to detect minor ions in regions of very weak fluxes, geometry factors need to be as large as possible within the mass and volume resources available. As a result, problems with saturation by the dominant fluxes and spillover to minor-ion channels in plasma regions with intense fluxes become especially acute. This article reports on a technique for solving the dynamic-range problem in the few eV to several keV energy/charge range that is of central importance for space physics research where the dominant ion is of low mass/charge (typically H⁺), and the minor ions are of higher mass/charge (typically O⁺). The technique involves employing a radio-frequency modulation of the deflection electric field in the back section of an electrostatic analyzer in a time-of-flight instrument. This technique is shown to reduce H⁺ counts by a controllable amount of up to factors of 1000 while reducing O⁺ counts by only a few percent that can be calibrated. ©2005 American Institute of Physics