Elements Discrimination in the Study of Super-Heavy Elements using an Ionization Chamber

Dedicated ionization chamber was built and installed to measure the energy loss of very heavy nuclei at 2.7 MeV/u produced in fusion reactions in inverse kinematics (beam of 208Pb). After going through the ionization chamber, products of reactions on 12C, 18O targets are implanted in a Si detector. Their identification through their alpha decay chain is ambiguous when their half-life is short. After calibration with Pb and Th nuclei, the ionization chamber signal allowed us to resolve these ambiguities. In the search for rare super-heavy nuclei produced in fusion reactions in inverse or symmetric kinematics, such a chamber will provide direct information on the nuclear charge of each implanted nucleus.Comment: submitted to NIMA, 10 pages+4 figures, Latex, uses elsart.cls and grahpic

The Fukushima Daiichi Accident

The Fukushima Daiichi Accident consists of a Report by the IAEA Director General and five technical volumes. It is the result of an extensive international collaborative effort involving five working groups with about 180 experts from 42 Member States with and without nuclear power programmes and several international bodies. It provides a description of the accident and its causes, evolution and consequences, based on the evaluation of data and information from a large number of sources available at the time of writing. The set contains six printed parts and five supplementary CD-ROMs. Contents: Report by the Director General; Technical Volume 1/5, Description and Context of the Accident; Technical Volume 2/5, Safety Assessment; Technical Volume 3/5, Emergency Preparedness and Response; Technical Volume 4/5, Radiological Consequences; Technical Volume 5/5, Post-accident Recovery; Annexes. The JRC contributed to volumes 1,2 and 3, which are attached.JRC.F.5-Nuclear Reactor Safety Assessmen

The low-pressure focal plane detector of the MAGNEX spectrometer

The focal plane detector of the MAGNEX large acceptance magnetic spectrometer is presented. It is based on a large low-pressure gas-filled tracker followed by a wall of silicon detectors to stop the particles. It has been designed for the stringent requirements from the ion optics and the foreseen use with heavy ions. The performances of the device are demonstrated using 4MeV/u oxygen beams. The results of the tests are described and discussed in view of the application of the particle identification and trajectory reconstruction techniques to recover the kinematic properties of the reaction products. They demonstrate the suitability of such detector in a wide range of experiments where low-energy thresholds, large-accepted solid angle, precise momentum measurement and good particle identification are needed