The main goal of the proposed facility is therefore to provide an accelerator system to perform forefront research in Nuclear Physics by studying nuclei far from stability.

The SPES facility is mainly concentrating on the production of neutron-rich radioactive nuclei having mass in the range 80-160 based on the ISOL technique.

Moreover the SPES facility will also cover interdisciplinary Applied Physics in the fields of Material Science and Medical Applications.

A simplified layout sketch of SPES facility is shown in the picture. SPES is a project of the INFN Road Map for the Nuclear Physics development.

The radioactive beam facility is based on the ISOL technique that in our specific case is compose by:

• The primary beam is provided by a high performance BEST cyclotron with high output current (~1 mA) and high energy up to 70 MeV.

• The cyclotron has two exit ports, one dedicated to the production of Radioactive Ion Beams and the second to applications.

• Radioactive Ion Beams are produced by proton induced fission on a multi-foil UCx direct target at a rate of 1013 fission/s.

• The reacceleration of those fission products will be done with the existing ALPI-PIAVE accelerator system already installed at LNL. Those beams of extremely unstable nuclei are called Radioactive Ion Beams because they decay into stable species in very short times. Neutron rich re-accelerated beams will be available at energies up to 13 MeV/u in the mass region A=130. For a complete list of beams see here (link).

• The facility for applied physics is based on proton beams coming from the second exit port of the  cyclotron (70 MeV, 500 microA).

• Using an appropriate target, this second proton beam could induce the production of kinematical focused neutrons that could be also use for applications like a neutron beam.