Experimental Setup and Performance Testing of an Automated Target Characterization System

Abstract

Different physical experiments nowadays require the usage of a target onto which a laser or particle beam is focused. A target characterization becomes very important before using them in experiments to make sure their surfaces topography and thickness are within a range of expected values for the experiments. To characterize the targets produced in the Detector and Target laboratory at the Institute for Nuclear Physics at the University of Darmstadt an automated system based on optical metrology was developed. Using optical Point Confocal Sensors and motors controlled by a LabVIEW application it is possible to characterize targets with a lateral resolution up to 4 m with sub-micron thickness precision. The whole scanning system is more efficient in terms of time and accuracy due to its automation and the optical sensors compared to the previously used method that made use of physical contact scanning and was not automated. The solution developed within this work has some basic functionalities allowing the user to define some scanning parameters, but more functionalities specially related to the Point Confocal Sensors can be developed to allow a more customizable and efficient scanning.