Towards Na-26 Via (D,P) With Sharc And Tigress And A Novel Zero-Degree Detector

Nucleon transfer experiments have in recent years begun to be exploited in the study of nuclei far from stability, using radioactive beams in inverse kinematics. New techniques are still being developed in order to perform these experiments. The present experiment is designed to study the odd-odd nucleus Na-26 which has a high density of states and therefore requires gamma-ray detection to distinguish between them. The experiment employed an intense beam of up to 3 x 10(7) pps of Na-25 at 5.0 MeV/nucleon from the ISAC-II facility at TRIUMF. The new silicon array SHARC was used for the first time and was coupled to the segmented clover gamma-ray array TIGRESS. A novel thin plastic scintillator detector was employed at zero degrees to identify and reject reactions occurring on the carbon component of the (CD)(2) target. The efficiency of the background rejection using this detector is described with respect to the proton and gamma-ray spectra from the (d,p) reaction.