New recoil transfer chamber for thermalization of heavy ions produced in fusion-evaporation reactions

A new Recoil Transfer Chamber (RTC) has been designed, fabricated, and characterized at the Cyclotron Institute at Texas A&M University. The design is based on a gas stopper that was previously in routine use at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. This new RTC uses He gas to stop ions, and a combination of a static electric field and gas flow to maximize the extraction efficiency. In offline experiments, a 228Th source was used to produce 216Po which was successfully extracted even though it has a short half-life. In online experiments using the products of the 118Sn(40Ar, 6n)152Er reaction, an efficiency of several tens of percent was measured.