Commissioning of the ACtive TARget and Time Projection Chamber (ACTAR TPC)

B. Mauss (1) , P. Morfouace (1) , T. Roger (1) , J. Pancin (1) , G.F. Grinyer (1) , J. Giovinazzo (2) , V. Alcindor (1) , H. Álvarez-Pol , A. Arokiaraj , M. Babo (3) , B. Bastin (1) , C. Borcea , M. Caamaño , S. Ceruti , B. Fernández-Domínguez , E. Foulon-Moret (1) , P. Gangnant (1) , S. Giraud (1) , A. Laffoley , G. Mantovani , T. Marchi , B. Monteagudo (4) , J. Pibernat (2) , O. Poleshchuk , R. Raabe , J. Refsgaard , A. Revel (1, 4) , F. Saillant (1) , M. Stanoiu , G. Wittwer (1) , J. Yang

1 GANIL - Grand Accélérateur National d'Ions Lourds
2 CENBG - Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires de Bordeaux Gradignan
3 IPNO - Institut de Physique Nucléaire d'Orsay
4 LPCC - Laboratoire de physique corpusculaire de Caen

The ACtive TARget and Time Projection Chamber (ACTAR TPC) is a novel gas-filled detector that has recently been constructed at GANIL. This versatile detector is a gaseous thick target that allows the tracking of charged particles in three dimensions and provides a precise reaction energy reconstruction from the vertex position. A commissioning experiment using resonant scattering of a 3.2 MeV/nucleon 18 O beam on an isobutane gas (proton) target was performed. The beam and the heavy scattered ions were stopped in the gas volume, while the light recoil left the active volume and were stopped in auxiliary silicon detectors. A dedicated tracking algorithm was applied to determine the angle of emission and the length of the trajectory of the ions, to reconstruct the reaction kinematics used to built the excitation functions of the 1 H( 18 O, 18 O) 1 H and 1 H( 18 O, 15 N) 4 He reactions. In this article, we describe the design of the detector and the data analysis, that resulted in center of mass reaction energy resolutions of 38(4) keV FWHM and 54(9) keV FWHM for the proton and alpha channels, respectively.

Mots clés: ACtive TARget; Time Projection Chamber; micromegas; Resonant scattering

Domaines: Physique [physics]

B. Mauss, P. Morfouace, T. Roger, J. Pancin, G.F. Grinyer, et al.. Commissioning of the ACtive TARget and Time Projection Chamber (ACTAR TPC). Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 2019, 940, pp.498-504. ⟨10.1016/j.nima.2019.06.067⟩. ⟨hal-02187899⟩