Speaker
Maria Jose Garcia Borge
(CERN)
Description
The ISOLDE Facility at CERN produces radioactive beams through fission, spallation and fragmentation reactions induced by 1.4 GeV protons from the PS booster. By a clever combination of target and ion source unit intense and pure beams of 700 different nuclei of 75 elements are produced and delivered to experiments where the properties of the nuclei are determined. Since more than a decade it offers the largest variety of post-accelerated radioactive beams in the world today. The combination of the Mini-ball gamma-ray array and T-REX charged particle detection system has been successfully used to study nuclear shapes through Coulomb excitation and transfer reactions up in different region of the nuclear chart. Elastic scattering and transfer in light system has allowed for the study of the interplay between halo structure and reaction mechanism as well to reveal the composition of the few excite states of halo and unbound nuclei.
In order to broaden the scientific opportunities beyond the reach of the present facility, the HIE-ISOLDE (High Intensity & Energy) project will provide major improvements in energy range, beam intensity and beam quality. A major element of the project will be an increase of the final energy of the post-accelerated beams to 10A MeV throughout the periodic table. The first stage will boost the energy of the current REX LINAC to 5 MeV/u where the Coulomb excitation cross sections are strongly increased with respect to the previous 3 MeV/u and many transfer reaction channels will be opened.
The first phase of HIE-ISOLDE will start for Physics in the autumn of 2015. The physics program is very attractive. After a submission of thirty-four letters of intend in 2009, twenty-seven experiments have been approved for day-one physics with more than six hundred shift allocated. The physics cases approved expand over the wide range of post-accelerated beams available at ISOLDE. A large variety of instrumentation will be implemented. In this presentation the HIE-ISOLDE project will be described together with a panorama of the physics cases addressed.
