Electronic stopping cross sections of rhodium for protons and determination of the mean excitation energy
摘要
We report new experimental electronic stopping cross sections of rhodium for protons over the energy range 376-2087 keV. The measurements were performed using a transmission technique based on the centroid energy shift of protons backscattered from a thin gold scattering film, recorded with and without the rhodium foil in the beam path. A total of 33 electronic stopping cross section values were obtained with relative uncertainties not exceeding 5.2%, providing benchmark data in an intermediate energy region where experimental information for rhodium has been largely missing. The new dataset is reproduced at the few percent level by several of the investigated semi-empirical and theoretical descriptions, while other approaches exhibit larger, energy-dependent deviations. Finally, the data were analyzed within a Bethe-Bloch stopping formalism to extract the mean excitation energy of rhodium, yielding