Building a VME spectrometer and testing Si PIN diode detector: a feasibility study for the first nuclear astrophysical experiments using a pelletron

This work presents the logical design, connections between NIM and VME elec­tronic modules, and the data acquisition programming to build a complete detector readout system. The test experiments were carried out with commercial silicon PIN diode S3590-09 bare detectors bombarded by charged particles from a 241Am α-source and Rutherford elastic backscattering (RBS) protons induced by 2.5 MeV proton beam bombarding on an Au-on-glass target, and with a NaI scintillation detector bombarded by gammas from 27Al(p, γ)28Si reaction with proton beam energy of 1.379 MeV. The test showed that the spectrometer operated steadily and its versatility for different kind of detector. The energy resolutions of the Si diodes were less than 0.5% energy of a charged particle, which satisfies the foreseen requirement for the upcoming experiments.

6Li+28Si reaction cross sections at sub-barrier energies

Total reaction cross sections at near barrier energies (9-13 MeV) were measured for the system 6Li+28Si adopting a new technique. The results will be discussed in terms of the threshold anomaly at barrier