Spectroscopy of Actinide Nuclei – Perspectives with Position Sensitive HPGe Detectors

Recent advances in in-beam gamma-ray spectroscopy of actinide nuclei are based on highly efficient arrays of escape-suppressed spectrometers. The sensitivity of these detector arrays is greatly enhanced by the combination with powerful mass separators or particle detector systems. This technique is demonstrated by an experiment to investigate excited states in 234U after the one-neutron-transfer reaction 235U(d,t). In coincidence with the outgoing tritons, γ-rays were detected with the highly efficient MINIBALL spectrometer. In the near future an even enhanced sensitivity will be achieved by utilizing position sensitive HPGe detectors which will exploit the novel detection method of gamma-ray energy tracking in electrically segmented germanium detectors. An example for this novel approach is the investigation neutron-rich actinide Th and U nuclei after multi nucleon transfer reactions employing the AGATA demonstrator and PRISMA setup at LNL, Italy. A primary 136Xe beam hitting a 238U target was used to produce the nuclei of interest. Beam-like reaction products after neutron transfer were selected by the PRISMA spectrometer. Coincident γ-rays from excited states in beam and target like particles were measured with the position sensitive AGATA HPGe detectors. Improved Doppler correction and quality of the γ-spectra is based on the novel γ-ray tracking technique, which was successfully exploited in this region.