C. Matei

Gamma ray beams for Nuclear Astrophysics: first results of tests and simulations of the ELISSA array

The Extreme Light Infrastructure-Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility, under construction in Magurele near Bucharest in Romania, will provide high-intensity and high-resolution gamma ray beams that can be used to address hotly debated problems in nuclear astrophysics. For this purpose, a silicon strip detector array (named ELISSA) will be realized in a common effort by ELI-NP and INFN-LNS (Catania, Italy), in order to measure excitation functions and angular distributions over a wide energy and angular range. A prototype of ELISSA was built and tested at Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (INFN-LNS) in Catania with the support of ELI-NP. On this occasion, we carried out experiments with alpha sources and with a 11 MeV 7Li beam. Thanks to our approach, the first results of those tests show up a very good energy resolution (better than 1%) and very good position resolution, of the order of 1 mm. Below 1 MeV, a resolution of the order of 6 mm is found, still good enough for the measurement of angular distribution and the kinematical identification of the reactions induced on the target by gamma beams.

Neutron detector characterization for SCINTIA array

SCINTIA is a new detector array of organic scintillators under development at the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM). The present design of SCINTIA includes NE213, p-terphenyl and Li glass neutron detectors positioned in a spherical configuration around the target. The properties of a novel p-terphenyl neutron detector to be used with SCINTIA have been investigated using photon sources and neutrons from a time tagged 252Cf(sf) source. The results show that the p-terphenyl crystal has better energy resolution, increased proton light output and neutron efficiency when compared to a similar size NE213 equivalent neutron detector.