Commissioning of the MAGNEX large-acceptance spectrometer

Abstract. The MAGNEX large-acceptance spectrometer has been commissioned with beams from the Tandem accelerator at INFN-LNS Catania. The optics were tested with elastically-scattered 7Li, 16O and 48Ti beams with various apertures mounted after the target. The momentum dispersion was verified to be in agreement with the optics calculations. A demonstration of the particle identification capabilities of the PSD start detector and the focal plane detector was given by a measurement of the 27Al(7Li,6Li)28Al transfer reaction at a mean angle of 25°. The measured charge state distribution of 48Ti ions is in agreement with predictions for a gold stripping foil. Preliminary results of the software reconstruction of incident angle and excitation energy, obtained through matrices based on a 3D-interpolation of the measured field maps, are encouraging.