Magnetic guidance of charged particles

Many experiments and devices in physics use static magnetic fields to guide charged particles from a source onto a detector, and we ask the innocent question: What is the distribution of particle intensity over the detector surface? One should think that the solution to this seemingly simple problem is well known. We show that, even for uniform guide fields, this is not the case and present analytical point spread functions (PSF) for magnetic transport that deviate strongly from previous results. The "magnetic" PSF shows unexpected singularities, which were recently also observed experimentally, and which make detector response very sensitive to minute changes of position, field amplitude, or particle energy. In the field of low-energy particle physics, these singularities may become a source of error in modern high precision experiments, or may be used for instrument tests, for instance in neutrino mass retardation spectrometers.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, version 2: improved approximation metho

The point spread function of electrons in a magnetic field, and the decay of the free neutron

Experiments in nuclear and particle physics often use magnetic fields to guide charged reaction products to a detector. Due to their gyration in the guide field, the particles hit the detector within an area that can be considerably larger than the diameter of the source where the particles are produced. This blurring of the image of the particle source on the detector surface is described by a suitable point spread function (PSF), which is defined as the image of a point source. We derive simple analytical expressions for such magnetic PSFs, valid for any angular distribution of the emitted particles that can be developed in Legendre polynomials. We investigate this rather general problem in the context of neutron beta decay spectrometers and study the effect of limited detector size on measured neutron decay correlation parameters. To our surprise, insufficient detector size does not affect much the accuracy of such measurements, even for rather large radii of gyration. This finding can considerably simplify the layout of the respective spectrometers.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figure