Study of C-12 excited states decaying into three a particles using the thick target inverse kinematic technique

We will show that the Thick Target Inverse Kinematics (TTIK) technique can be used to investigate the breakup of excited selfconjugate nuclei into many alpha particles. Two test runs were performed at Cyclotron Institute of Texas A&M University to study the reaction Ne-20+alpha at maximum beam energies of 10 and 12 AMeV. Due to the limited statistics, only events with alpha multiplicity up to three were analyzed. The analysis of the three alpha- particle emission data allowed the identification of the Hoyle state and other C-12 excited states decaying into three alpha particles. The results will be shown and compared with other data available in the literature.