FORTE: Fission, Other Reactions and Terra incognita Exploration
The experimental program is aimed at studying the role of shell effects in reactions between heavy ions finalized to the search of Superheavy Elements and to the production of neutron-rich nuclei in the Terra Incognita. Shell effects play a decisive role in spontaneous and low energy fission and in increasing the stability of heavy and superheavy nuclei. A signature of the setting up of the shell effects is the measured increase of the branching ratio of alpha decay with respect to fission decay in the region toward the island of stability (Z=114-122 and N=184). Shell effects embrace the entire chart of nuclides. To study their importance on the heavy and superheavy mass region the following processes are of paramount importance and are the main focus of this research program: 1) fission, quasifission and ternary fission of intermediate mass, heavy and superheavy nuclei; 2) production mechanisms (multinucleon transfer and surrogate reactions) and properties of exotic neutron-rich species in the unknown nuclear chart regions, including those of astrophysical interest. Furthermore, the present program has a strong connection with the radioactive beams available at ISOLDE and the ones produced at the EXOTIC facility at LNL and the ones being offered by the SPES facility at LNL. Additional research themes can be explored with the same facilities and experimental setups which are part of the FORTE collaboration.
Typical experimental probes are Mass and Total Kinetic Energy of binary fragments and their combined Mass-Energy distribution (MED), light particles (n, p and a) energy and angular distributions.