Installation, commissioning, and acceptance measurements of EMMA

The ElectroMagnetic Mass Analyzer EMMA is a vacuum mode recoil mass spectrometer that is capable of horizontally dispersing reaction recoils according to their mass/charge ratio at its focal plane station. The recoils enter into two consecutive gas-filled proportional counters, one that detects their positions and the other to measure their energy loss per unit length as well as the residual energy so that the recoils may be uniquely identified. EMMA was designed to exhibit excellent beam suppression so that reaction channels that are weakly populated may be extracted from the unreacted beam and high-yield background channels. EMMA has undergone several commissioning tests to determine how it performs compared to its design specifications. This thesis covers a subset of the tests which involved using a radioactive alpha source as well as accelerated ion beam backscattering to determine its energy/charge and angular acceptances as well as its mass/charge dispersion and acceptance as part of the commissioning of the spectrometer.