AbstractA new time-of-flight detector arrangement has been developed and optimised for elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA). In contrast to other ERDA detectors, recoil masses are restricted to values below 40. Then incident ions in the mass range below 60 amu at energies of 0.5–1.0 MeV/amu are suitable which can be easily produced by tandem accelerators above 3 MV terminal voltage. The flight path necessary for mass separation can be reduced to below 20 cm and large solid angles become possible with large but still standard size surface barrier detectors. Sufficient position sensitivity is achieved by time-of-flight measurements over mm distances. The flight path is defined by two detectors, a pure timing detector and a surface barrier detector, tilted in opposite directions. The detection set-up consists of two channelplate detectors and a subsequent surface barrier detector (SBD), which finally stops the projectile (ion or recoil). Both timing detectors are of tilted foil type. Electrons emitted from a thin foil are accelerated towards a channelplate detector. The tilt angles of the foils are dependent on the flight-path and distance from the target. By choosing appropriate tilt angles, the path length differences over the foil area are minimised. The surface barrier detector at the end of the detector set-up is tilted in opposite direction of the foils in order to get the position from time-of-flight between the second foil and the SBD. SBDs with sensitive areas of 400–600 mm² are suitable and can be obtained commercially. With this set-up, solid angles of 5 msr and more become feasible; this increases detection probabilities (and count rates) over traditional designs.