Progress at the N=126 factory at ANL

11 Jun 2024, 11:00
30m
A102 (Agora, University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

A102

Agora, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Agora, Mattilanniemi 2, 40100 Jyväskylä, Finland
Invited Presentation Plenary

Speaker

Guy Savard

Description

The N=126 factory is a new facility that uses multi-nucleon transfer reactions to create neutron-rich isotopes of the heaviest elements for studies of interest to the formation of the last abundance peak in the r-process. This region of the nuclear chart is difficult to access by standard fragmentation or spallation reactions and as a result has remained mostly unexplored. The nuclei of interest, very neutron-rich isotopes around Z=70-95, will be produced by multi-nucleon exchange of a high intensity 10 MeV/u 136Xe beam on the most neutron-rich stable isotopes of heavy elements such as 198Pt and 238U. This reaction mechanism can transfer a large number of neutrons and create with larger than mb cross-section very neutron-rich isotopes. The reaction mechanism is a nuclear surface process and the reaction products come out at around the grazing angle which makes them very difficult to collect. The N=126 factory circumvents this difficulty by using a unique large high-intensity gas catcher, similar to the one currently in operation at CARIBU, to collect the target-like reaction products and turn them into a low-energy beam that is then mass separated with a medium resolution electromagnetic separator (dM/M ~ 1/1500), followed by an RFQ buncher and an MR-TOF (dM/M ~ 1/100000) system. The extracted radioactive beams are essentially pure and will be available at low-energy for mass measurements with the CPT mass spectrometer, decay study with the X-array, and eventually laser spectroscopy studies. Overall status and commissioning results for the facility, together with the planned physics program, will be presented.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Physics, under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357 and used resources of ANL’s ATLAS facility, an Office of Science User Facility.

Author

Guy Savard

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