A magnetic proton recoil (MPR) neutron spectrometer is being designed for SPARC, a high magnetic field (BT = 12 T), compact (R0 = 1.85 m, a = 0.57 m) tokamak currently under construction in Devens, MA, USA. MPR neutron spectrometers are versatile tools for making high fidelity ab initio calibrated measurements of fusion neutron flux spectra and have been used to infer fusion power, ion temperature, fuel ion ratio, and suprathermal fuel populations at several high performance fusion experiments. The performance of an MPR neutron spectrometer is in large part determined by the design of the magnetic field, which disperses and focuses recoil protons. This article details the ion optical design of a high-resolution MPR neutron spectrometer, including the amelioration of image aberrations due to nonlinear effects. An optimized design is presented that achieves ion optical energy resolution δE/E < 1% and focal plane properties that enable straightforward integration with the hodoscope detector array.
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