Recoil accelerator mass spectrometry of nuclear reaction products

We propose to use the technique of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) to detect slow heavy products of nuclear reactions by accelerating them immediately after their production and recoil from a target. The AMS method is conventionally applied to the measurements of very low concentrations of specific isotopes by extracting them from an ion source. It may be possible to apply the technique also to the detection of rare products of nuclear reactions induced by an ion beam on a target. The method would be particularly suited to the detection of very slow heavy nuclei which are not directly detectable or identifiable by usual methods. Their subsequent acceleration could provide them with an energy adequate for their identification by AMS methods and their discrimination from the primary beam. A class of nuclear reactions which seems to be suited to the proposed technique is that of radiative capture. We present here the results of an experiment in which heavy nuclei produced by bombarding a carbon target with a ¹² C beam at 12 MeV were analyzed by recoil accelerator mass spectrometry. The carbon foil, normally used as a stripper in the high-voltage terminal of the 14UD Rehovot Pelletron tandem accelerator served as the target for the ¹²C^- beam and recoiling accelerated nuclei were detected and identified by momentum and energy dispersion and time-of-flight measurements.