Design report of the KISS-II facility for exploring the origin of uranium

One of the critical longstanding issues in nuclear physics is the origin of the heavy elements such as platinum and uranium. The r-process hypothesis is generally supported as the process through which heavy elements are formed via explosive rapid neutron capture. Many of the nuclei involved in heavy-element synthesis are unidentified, short-lived, neutron-rich nuclei, and experimental data on their masses, half-lives, excited states, decay modes, and reaction rates with neutron etc., are incredibly scarce. The ultimate goal is to understand the origin of uranium. The nuclei along the pathway to uranium in the r-process are in "Terra Incognita". In principle, as many of these nuclides have more neutrons than 238U, this region is inaccessible via the in-flight fragmentation reactions and in-flight fission reactions used at the present major facilities worldwide. Therefore, the multi-nucleon transfer (MNT) reaction, which has been studied at the KEK Isotope Separation System (KISS), is attracting attention. However, in contrast to in-flight fission and fragmentation, the nuclei produced by the MNT reaction have characteristic kinematics with broad angular distribution and relatively low energies which makes them non-amenable to in-flight separation techniques. KISS-II would be the first facility to effectively connect production, separation, and analysis of nuclides along the r-process path leading to uranium. This will be accomplished by the use of a large solenoid to collect MNT products while rejecting the intense primary beam, a large helium gas catcher to thermalize the MNT products, and an MRTOF mass spectrograph to perform mass analysis and isobaric purification of subsequent spectroscopic studies. The facility will finally allow us to explore the neutron-rich nuclides in this Terra Incognita.Comment: Editors: Yutaka Watanabe and Yoshikazu Hirayam

The r-process nucleosynthesis during the decompression of neutron star crust material

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Rapid decrease of fragment emission time in the range of 3-5 MeV/u excitation energy

Multifragment emission processes from highly excited nuclei produced in 40Ar+197Au reactions at incident energies of 30 and 60 McV/u are compared. At the lowest bombarding energy and 3.3 MeV/u excitation energy, the composite system decay process supports the hypothesis of long-lived equilibrated nuclei decaying by successive binary splittings. For excited nuclei around 5 MeV/u, the depletion observed at small relative angles in the correlation functions is interpreted as the result of a strong reduction in the fragment emission time scale.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Rapid decrease of fragment emission time in the range of 3-5 MeV/u excitation energy

Multifragment emission processes from highly excited nuclei produced in 40Ar+197Au reactions at incident energies of 30 and 60 McV/u are compared. At the lowest bombarding energy and 3.3 MeV/u excitation energy, the composite system decay process supports the hypothesis of long-lived equilibrated nuclei decaying by successive binary splittings. For excited nuclei around 5 MeV/u, the depletion observed at small relative angles in the correlation functions is interpreted as the result of a strong reduction in the fragment emission time scale.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Multifragment decay of highly excited nuclei

Coincidences between at least three fragments emitted at large angle have been used to study central collisions in the Ar+Au reactions at 30 and 60 MeV/u incident energies. For both energies, the formation of equilibrated very hot nuclei is evidenced. Average excitation energy as high as 1.2 GeV is reached in the reaction at 60 MeV/u. The increase of the excitation energy deposited for the upper bombarding energy is confirmed by the correlated increases of the nuclear temperature and of the evaporated light-particle multiplicity. © 1993.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe