We measured the Coulomb dissociation of ¹⁶O into ⁴He and ¹²C at the R³B setup in a first campaign within FAIR Phase 0 at GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt. The goal was to improve the accuracy of the experimental data for the ¹²C(α,γ)¹⁶O fusion reaction and to reach lower center-ofmass energies than measured so far.
The experiment required beam intensities of 10⁹ ¹⁶O ions per second at an energy of 500 MeV/nucleon. The rare case of Coulomb breakup into ¹²C and ⁴He posed another challenge: The magnetic rigidities of the particles are so close because of the same mass-to-charge-number ratio A/Z = 2 for ¹⁶O, ¹²C and ⁴He. Hence, radical changes of the R³B setup were necessary. All detectors had slits to allow the passage of the unreacted ¹⁶O ions, while ⁴He and ¹²C would hit the detectors’ active areas depending on the scattering angle and their relative energies. We developed and built detectors based on organic scintillators to track and identify the reaction products with sufficient precision.
