A METHOD TO STUDY HEAVY-ION REACTIONS USING POSITION-SENSITIVE AND BRAGG CURVE SPECTROSCOPY DETECTORS

A large area Bragg curve spectroscopy (BCS) detector and a position se nsitive parallel grid avalanche counter have been developed to study h eavy ion reactions, such as inelastic excitations and few nucleon tran sfer reactions near the Coulomb barrier. Reasonably good resolutions h ave been achieved for energy, atomic number and angle. A theoretical i nvestigation on the mass dependence of the Bragg peak signal from the BCS detector, shows that there is a negligible mass dependence related to the geometry of the detector. The mass number of the heavy ions wh ich cannot be obtained by the above method, has been identified by det ecting the corresponding characteristic gamma rays from the product nu clei with two large solid angle gamma ray detectors.