Welcome To The CCPAC website
The Canadian Charged Particle Accelerator Consortium is a National Facility providing charged particle beams for analysis and modification of materials to a wide variety of academic and other users from Canada and abroad. The services provided by CCPAC are essential for progress in such diverse applications as automotive lubricant development, detectors for particle and dark-matter physics, functional coatings, innovative nuclear reactor technology, geochemistry, aerosol science, space science, and fundamental condensed matter physics.
The resource consists of six megavolt accelerators and associated beam lines located in four distinct laboratories. A 1.7 MV Tandetron accelerator with beamlines for Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry / Channeling and high-current ion implantation and a 6 MV Pelletron Tandem accelerator with 7 beam lines are housed at the Université de Montréal. A 1.7 MV Tandetron with 4 beam lines including Medium Energy Ion Scattering capability is housed at the University of Western Ontario. Guelph University houses a single-ended 3 MV Pelletron accelerator with three beam lines designed to provide elemental analysis over major, minor and trace elements. A 4 MV Tandetron accelerator at Queens University has beamlines optimized for the testing of nuclear reactor materials. These accelerators provide ion beams with energies ranging from 25 keV to 75 MeV. Essentially the entire periodic system can be accelerated.
Ion beam analysis provides quantitative depth profiling of your samples composition without calibration standard.
Ion implantation and irradiation is used to inject dopant in semiconductors or rare-earths in photonic materials, generate defects in space and nuclear materials, harden metal surfaces, produce and manipulate nanoparticles.
Proton-induced X-ray emission provides non-destructive chemical analysis of a sample, calibrated using NIST and similar standards. The sample may be interrogated for major, minor and trace elements with a beam several mm wide or the beam may be focussed to a spot for interrogation of individual features such as mineral grains or zoning within a rock. Spot size can go as low as 1 - 2 microns. The spot can be rastered in two dimensions to provide element maps. Data from each of these modes are analyzed by software developed at Guelph and widely used around the world. Samples analyzed in volume at Guelph in the past include urban and rural aerosols, alloys, potential solar cell materials, sulfide ores and mine tailings, sulfate mine tailings, minerals, fish otoliths (species migration studies), geochemical reference materials, post-mortem samples.