Guiding of highly charged ions through nanocapillaries in PET: Dependence on the projectile energy and charge

We measured the energy and charge state dependence of the transmission of highly charged ions through nanocapillaries with a diameter of 200 nm and a length of 10 mu m. The nanocapillaries were produced by etching ion tracks originating from 250 MeV krypton ions passed through PET polymer foils leading to a significant improvement in the parallelism of the capillaries to former used capillary foils. This improvement allowed us to investigate the guiding effect over a wider range in energy and charge state than done before. In accordance with model calculations, the experimental results show a scaling law describing the dependence of the integrated ion transmission on tilt angle, energy and charge state of the incident ions. The scaling law for capillaries with high parallelism are found to be applicable in a wide range of energies and charge states. New parameters describing the capability of a capillary foil to guide highly charge ions were derived. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.