A novel Si strip array to investigate reaction and decay mechanisms

Abstract

The performance of a novel set-up of double-sided silicon micro-strip detectors (DSSD) developed for the GSI-R3B project (reaction studies with relativistic radioactive beams) is presented. The set-up was used in an experiment aimed at measuring the two-proton decay of 19Mg. This experiment required to record simultaneously protons and the residual nuclei with good position and energy resolution. Our experimental results show that both protons and heavy ions ranging from Z=2 up to Z=12 can be identified with good signal-to-noise ratio and high energy and spatial resolution. This allowed to reconstruct 2- and 3-particle vertices with high precision, opening the possibility to measure lifetimes of very short-lived nuclei and to obtain precise angular correlations of the outgoing particles. This detection system serves as a prototype for the R3B recoil detector, which will be composed of a two-layer Si strip tracker.