Refrigerated Hydrogen Gas Jet for the Fermilab Antiproton Accumulator

Abstract

A hydrogen gas jet has been built for use at Fermilab for the study of charmonium spectroscopy in proton-antiproton annihilations (Experiment 835). The hydrogen gas jet is part of an upgrade to a previous experiment (Experiment 760) which ran in the Fermilab 1990–1991 fixed target program utilizing a jet cooled to 80 K with liquid nitrogen. The jet delivers a defined stream of hydrogen gas which travels through a series of vacuum chambers and then intersects the circulating antiproton beam. The goal of the upgrade is to provide a hydrogen gas stream at least twice as dense as used for the earlier experiment to increase the interaction rate and allow an improved study of rare processes. This is achieved by cooling the stream to below 30 K using a Gifford-McMahon refrigerator. The jet apparatus is designed to allow motion in the plane perpendicular to the gas stream as well as angular positioning at the jet nozzle to provide a means of optimizing the interaction rate. Two skimmers located in the vacuum chambers are used to define the gas stream dimensions. The jet target vacuum chambers require constant pumping with turbomolecular pumps. The vacuum space around the jet is designed to have a large system pumping speed so that the chamber pressure can be maintained below an absolute pressure of 1 Pa. The jet will operate in the next fixed target run at Fermilab. Details of the design and test results are discussed.