Development of fission suppression devices for afrodite
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Date
2005
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Abstract
The discovery of the third minimum in various heavy mass nuclei, for example, in the U-Th region, has developed interest in the nuclear physics community to study the behaviour of the nucleus in this minimum. The nuclear shape that is predicted to exist in this minimum is known as a hyperdeformed shape, which corresponds to 3:1 major to minor axis ratio. A hyperdeformed nucleus could be created when a heavy target is bombarded with a light beam, for example, when an a-particle beam bombards 232Th. However in such a reaction, the strongest channel is fission, which occurs almost 99% of the time. Due to the high fission background, which reduces the experimental sensitivity for picking out y decay of hyperdeformed states from the background, many experiments have failed to observe hyperdeformed bands in this minimum. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the development of two fission suppression devices, namely a recoil detector and a solar cell array at iThemba LABS (South Africa).
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science in fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Master of Science in the Department of Physics and Engineering at the University of Zululand, 2005.
Keywords
fission