The ISOL-France collaboration is involved in two national facilities dedicated to the production of radioactive ion beams (RIBs), which are GANIL (SPIRAL1, SPIRAL2-S3), ALTO.
GANIL-SPIRAL1
SPIRAL1 is a facility dedicated to the production of radioactive ions at GANIL using the Isotope Separation On-Line (ISOL) method. At the core of the facility is a Target Ion Source System that couples a graphite fragmentation target to an ion source. The GANIL accelerator complex provides a large range of primary beams to the SPIRAL1 facility from 12C to 238U, with energy ranging from few MeV to 95 AMeV. The targets are graphite based and new materials are being studied. Four ion sources have been developed so far: Nanogan (for gaseous species), FEBIAD (for condensable), MonoNaKe (for alkaline) and TULIP (for proton rich isotopes). With the CIME cyclotron, RIBs can be post-accelerated up to 25 AMeV. Low energybeams will be sent to the DESIR facility, where they can be further purified before being sent to the experimental setups.
GANIL-SPIRAL2/S3
The superconducting linear accelerator of SPIRAL2 in GANIL provides very high intensities of stable heavy-ion beams. The Super Separator Spectrometer (S3) facility has been developed in the framework of the SPIRAL2 project to exploit these beams for the production of exotic nuclei by fusion-evaporation reactions and subsequent separation in the spectrometer. The main areas of focus for the production of RIBs fit into two broad categories:
- Heavy and Super-Heavy Elements (SHE): decay spectroscopy and determination of ground-state/isomeric-state properties, depending on production rate.
- Neutron-deficient nuclei close to the proton drip-line, in particular in the N=Z region of the nuclear chart.
Although essentially an in-flight facility, S3 coupled to its Low Energy Branch (S3-LEB) will provide low-energy beams after stopping in a gas catcher. These beams will be studied by low-energy techniques either at S3-LEB or DESIR.
The production yields at GANIL are available here.