Eur. Phys. J. A (2017) 53: 211
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2017-12382-6

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Determination of lifetimes of nuclear excited states using the Recoil Distance Doppler Shift Method in combination with magnetic spectrometers

¹ Laboratorio de Radiaciones Ionizantes, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain
² Department of Physics, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden
³ Department of Physics, Oliver Lodge Laboratory, University of Liverpool, L69 7ZE, Liverpool, UK
⁴ Istituto de Física Corpuscular, CSIC-University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain
⁵ Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, INFN, Legnaro, Italy
⁶ University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
⁷ Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia dell’Università di Padova, Padova, Italy
⁸ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Padova, Padova, Italy
⁹ Institut für Kernphysik, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany
¹⁰ Institut für Kernphysik der Universität zu Köln, Köln, Germany

^* e-mail: doncel@liverpool.ac.uk

Received: 31 May 2017
Accepted: 8 September 2017
Published online: 27 October 2017

Abstract

The current work presents the determination of lifetimes of nuclear excited states using the Recoil Distance Doppler Shift Method, in combination with spectrometers for ion identification, normalizing the intensity of the peaks by the ions detected in the spectrometer as a valid technique that produces results comparable to the ones obtained by the conventional shifted-to-unsifted peak ratio method. The technique has been validated using data measured with the -ray array AGATA, the PRISMA spectrometer and the Cologne plunger setup. In this paper a test performed with the AGATA-PRISMA setup at LNL and the advantages of this new approach with respect to the conventional Recoil Distance Doppler Shift Method are discussed.