Investigation of reactions using a radioactive beam

Abstract Reactions such as 18 Ne(α, p) 21 Na of importance to Nuclear Astrophysics may be studied directly through the use of a radioactive beam and a gaseous helium target. A system to study such reactions has been developed and tested using the 13 N beam available at the Radioactive Ion Beam facility (RIB) at Louvain-la-Neuve. This ( α , p ) reaction was chosen as previous studies of the inverse reaction 16 O(p, α) 13 N allowed the resonance strength of a strong resonance at 8.07 MeV (Tilley et al., Nucl. Phys. A 564 (1993) 139) in the compound nucleus 17 F to be calculated and compared with that obtained through experiment. These resonance strengths showed good agreement and so validated the technique for further work.