https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-00975-z
Regular Article – Experimental Physics
Determination of 1p- and 2p-stripping excitation functions for 
O+
Ce using a recoil mass spectrometer
1
Nuclear Physics Group, Inter-University Accelerator Centre, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, 110067, New Delhi, India
2
Department of Physics and Astrophysics, Delhi University, 110007, Delhi, India
3
Department of Physics, Karnatak University, 580003, Dharwad, India
4
Department of Physics, Central University of Jharkhand, 835205, Ranchi, India
5
School of Physics and Materials Science, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, 147004, Patiala, India
6
Department of Physics, School of Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 152-8551, Tokyo, Japan
7
Nuclear Physics Division, Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 305-8577, Ibaraki, Japan
8
Life Science Division, Diamond Light Source Ltd., Diamond House, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, OX11 0DE, Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK
Received:
26
December
2022
Accepted:
10
March
2023
Published online:
26
March
2023
We report the first direct measurement of differential transfer cross sections using a Recoil Mass Spectrometer. Absolute differential 1p- and 2p-stripping cross sections at 
have been determined for the system O+Ce by detecting the heavier target-like ions at the focal plane of the Heavy Ion Reaction Analyzer. Focal plane spectra have been compared with the results of a semi-microscopic Monte-Carlo simulation to unambiguously identify the transfer channels. The methodology adopted in this work can be applied to measure multi-nucleon transfer cross sections using other similar recoil separators. The experimental excitation functions for the reactions 
and 
have been compared with coupled reaction channels calculations. Shell model calculations have been performed to extract spectroscopic information for the target-like nuclei. An excellent matching between measurement and theory has been obtained for 1p-stripping. For 2p-stripping, cluster transfer of two protons has been found to have dominant contribution. Measured transfer probabilities for 1p- and 2p-stripping channels have been compared with Time-Dependent Hartree–Fock calculations. Proton stripping channels are found to be more favourable compared to neutron pick-up channels. However, the theory overpredicts the measurement hinting at the need for extended approaches with explicit treatment of pairing correlations in the calculations.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-023-00975-z.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
