Using HIRA and the (p,d) reaction to study structure near N=50 shell closure

Oh! Bob Tribble! your review talk would have been the perfect intro for this topic! Oh well, here we go: Meredith wants to investigate on nuclear structure near the N=50 shell closure via (p,d) reactions. She ran a 10 day experiment at the NSCL during which her team was able to study several reactions, such as: 84Se(p,d)83Se, 86Kr(p,d)85Kr, 56Ni and 58Ni with (d, 3He) and (p,d). The experiment allowed to extract spectroscopic factors (S) in these nuclei, as well as relevant information for nuclear astrophysics, such as Gamov Teller Strenghts.

Mmmhh, spectroscopic factors, what are those? they tell us what a nucleon is doing, they represent the overlap of two quantum states and let us know about the single-particle properties of valence nucleons ... some discussion sets in now ... It kinda looks to me like people know what S is but they have a hard time explaining it. Oops! A table … what fraction of states is filled out with neutrons? … we want to look at general trends . Shown are N=49 and N=51. Now lets get some data for N=50!

Meredith's experiment at NSCL was completed on May2010, the primary beam was 86Kr @ 150Mev/u, the production target was 9Be, and the S800 spectrograph was used to identify 83Se at the focal plane, charge particle detectors see the deuteron while HIRA measures angle, and energy. The protons for the reaction were provided by a CH2 target, and since trapping mechanism is needed for good angle determination, they used HV foils and MCPs. The analysis of the experiment is in progress, so stay tuned!