THE DEDICATED ACCELERATOR-BASED IBA FACILITY AGLAE AT THE LOUVRE

The 6 SDH-2 2 MV tandem Pelletron accelerator of NEC has been installed at the Louvre to characterize museum artifacts by using IBA analytical techniques: PIXE and PIGME, RBS, ERD, as well as NRA. The facility is fitted with an electrostatic energy scanning system for automatically carried out resonance depth profiling. The accelerator hall has been designed to facilitate all the possible developments of AGLAE during the next decade, including a microbeam and AMS. The hall is entirely surrounded by one meter of concrete for the protection against deuteron-induced neutrons from d-RBS, NRA and DIXE-DIGME experiments. The machine is remote-controlled and will be entirely automated. Seven ports are available on the switching magnet. Two ports are already set up, one for IBA using a multipurpose vacuum chamber and the other for extracted-beam experiments. All the beam lines have been modularly designed for well controlled, halo-free beam impacts and a clean vacuum. We shall describe the facility and discuss the VME system for the automation of the experiments, the electronic equipment, and the powerful computer system used for the fast processing of the spectra, control of the experiments, and data storage. © 1990.