A STUDY OF THE 6Li (3He, pα) α REACTION

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the various aspects of the 6 Li ( 3 He, pα) α reaction. The study of the resonance structure of the very light nuclear systems from the point of view of determining experimentally the energies, the spins and the parities of the resonances is in the nature of a challenge principally because of the large widths associated with them. In the Mass-5 system, several positive parity resonances have been predicted in the region of 20 MeV of excitation energy, but direct experimental evidence for the existence of these resonances has been sparse. In the 6 Li ( 3 He, pα) α reaction, there are two principal ways in which a resonant state in 5 Li could be formed. The incident 3 He could pick up a neutron from the target having a residual 5 Li system. Alternately, in view of the strong probability for α + d clustering in the ground state of 6 Li, the projectile could form a 5 Li system by the pick-up of a deuteron from the target nucleus. A kinematically complete experiment is performed to study the three-body pick-up in the 6 Li ( 3 He, pα) α reaction by bombarding an isotopically enriched target with a 36 MeV 3 He beam.