Improvements of the DRAGON recoil separator at ISAC

The DRAGON (Detector of Recoils And Gammas Of Nuclear reactions) is used to measure radiative proton and alpha capture reaction rates involving both stable and radioactive, heavy-ion reactants at the TRIUMF-ISAC high intensity radioactive beam facility. Completed in 2001 it has been used for several challenging studies for nuclear astrophysics, e.g. 12C(α, γ)16O, 21Na(p, γ)22Mg, 26gAl(p, γ)27Si and 40Ca(α, γ)44Ti. Since initial operation, a number of improvements have been incorporated which are described here. These include a beam centering monitor based on a CCD camera, a mechanical iris to skim of beam halo, a solid state stripper acting as a charge state booster for beams with A ≳ 30, beta and gamma detectors to monitor beam intensity and to determine beam contamination in experiments with radioactive beam and the ionization chamber for both recoil identification and isobar separation.