High resolution resonant particle decay spectroscopy

Optimum energy resolution is being pursued in the study of the alpha particle decay spectroscopy of selected 1p-shell nuclei. Counter telescopes with two dimensional position sensitivity are used in coincidence to identify three and four-body final state reactions which proceed by sequential binary decay. Heavy ion beams at bombarding energies of 3 to 8 MeV/u from the Florida State Tandem/LINAC Accelerator Laboratory are used to initiate the reactions. Measured position and energy resolutions of the order of 1/2 % are used to provide excited state resolutions of ≈10 keV within a few hundred keV of the alpha-particle decay thresholds.