Isotopic germanium targets for high beam current applications at GAMMASPHERE

The creation of a specific heavy ion residue via heavy ion fusion can usually be achieved through a number of beam and target combinations. Sometimes it is necessary to choose combinations with rare beams and/or difficult targets in order to achieve the physics goals of an experiment. A case in point was a recent experiment to produce 152Dy at very high spins and low excitation energy with detection of the residue in a recoil mass analyzer. Both to create the nucleus cold and with a small recoil-cone so that the efficiency of the mass analyzer would be high, it was necessary to use the 80Se on 76Ge reaction rather than the standard 48Ca on 108Pd reaction. Because the recoil velocity of the 152Dy residues was very high using this symmetric reaction (5% v/c), it was furthermore necessary to use a stack of two thin targets to reduce the Doppler broadening. Germanium targets are fragile and do not withstand high beam currents, therefore the 76Ge target stacks were mounted on a rotating target wheel. A descrip...