Production cross sections for heavy-ion fragmentation reactions on a liquid deuterium target at intermediate energies

Abstract

The inclusive cross sections for 38 different reaction products produced in the interaction of $^{48}\mathrm{Ca}$, $^{40}\mathrm{S}$, and $^{42}\mathrm{S}$ beams around 100 MeV/nucleon with a liquid deuterium target are reported. The cross sections for the $^{48}\mathrm{Ca}$ +$^{2}\mathrm{H}$ products are compared to those with $^{48}\mathrm{Ca}$ incident on the commonly used fragmentation targets $^{9}\mathrm{Be}$ and $^{181}\mathrm{Ta}$ and also to global calculations for fragmentation reaction cross sections based on the EPAX parameterization. The sizes of the measured reaction cross sections for the deuterium target were comparable to those of the cross sections measured on the heavier targets, indicating that nucleon removal from a deuterium target can be carried out for single- and multiple-nucleon knockout reaction studies. It was also found that the charge exchange cross sections were large enough that it should be possible to obtain nuclear structure information from these reactions.