SiCILIA-Silicon Carbide Detectors for Intense Luminosity Investigations and Applications.

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a compound semiconductor, which is considered as a possible alternative to silicon for particles and photons detection. Its characteristics make it very promising for the next generation of nuclear and particle physics experiments at high beam luminosity. Silicon Carbide detectors for Intense Luminosity Investigations and Applications (SiCILIA) is a project starting as a collaboration between the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) and IMM-CNR, aiming at the realization of innovative detection systems based on SiC.

High-Precision Probe of the Fully Sequential Decay Width of the Hoyle State in ^{12}C.

The decay path of the Hoyle state in ^{12}C (E_{x}=7.654  MeV) has been studied with the ^{14}N(d,α_{2})^{12}C(7.654) reaction induced at 10.

Investigation of the ^{10}Li shell inversion by neutron continuum transfer reaction.

This Letter reports a study of the highly debated ^{10}Li structure through the d(^{9}Li,p)^{10}Li one-neutron transfer reaction at 100 MeV. The ^{10}Li energy spectrum is measured up to 4.6 MeV and angular distributions corresponding to different excitation energy regions are reported for the first time.

Signatures of the Giant Pairing Vibration in the 14C and 15C atomic nuclei.

Giant resonances are collective excitation modes for many-body systems of fermions governed by a mean field, such as the atomic nuclei. The microscopic origin of such modes is the coherence among elementary particle-hole excitations, where a particle is promoted from an occupied state below the Fermi level (hole) to an empty one above the Fermi level (particle). The same coherence is also predicted for the particle-particle and the hole-hole excitations, because of the basic quantum symmetry between particles and holes.

Nuclear reaction measurements on tissue-equivalent materials and GEANT4 Monte Carlo simulations for hadrontherapy.

When a carbon beam interacts with human tissues, many secondary fragments are produced into the tumor region and the surrounding healthy tissues. Therefore, in hadrontherapy precise dose calculations require Monte Carlo tools equipped with complex nuclear reaction models. To get realistic predictions, however, simulation codes must be validated against experimental results; the wider the dataset is, the more the models are finely tuned.

Carbon fragmentation measurements and validation of the Geant4 nuclear reaction models for hadrontherapy.

Nuclear fragmentation measurements are necessary when using heavy-ion beams in hadrontherapy to predict the effects of the ion nuclear interactions within the human body. Moreover, they are also fundamental to validate and improve the Monte Carlo codes for their use in planning tumor treatments. Nowadays, a very limited set of carbon fragmentation cross sections are being measured, and in particular, to our knowledge, no double-differential fragmentation cross sections at intermediate energies are available in the literature.

Charged particle's flux measurement from PMMA irradiated by 80 MeV/u carbon ion beam.

Hadrontherapy is an emerging technique in cancer therapy that uses beams of charged particles. To meet the improved capability of hadrontherapy in matching the dose release with the cancer position, new dose-monitoring techniques need to be developed and introduced into clinical use. The measurement of the fluxes of the secondary particles produced by the hadron beam is of fundamental importance in the design of any dose-monitoring device and is eagerly needed to tune Monte Carlo simulations.

Isospin dependence of incomplete fusion reactions at 25 MeV/nucleon.

40Ca+;{40,48}Ca,46Ti reactions at 25 MeV/nucleon have been studied using the 4pi CHIMERA detector. An isospin effect on the competition between fusionlike and binarylike reaction mechanisms has been observed. The probability of producing a heavy residue is lower in the case of N approximately Z colliding systems as compared to the case of reactions induced on the neutron rich 48Ca target.

Dielectron production in 12C+12C collisions at 2A GeV with the HADES spectrometer.

The invariant-mass spectrum of e+e- pairs produced in 12C+12C collisions at an incident energy of 2 GeV per nucleon has been measured for the first time. The measured pair production probabilities span over 5 orders of magnitude from the pi(0)-Dalitz to the rho/omega invariant-mass region. Dalitz decays of pi(0) and eta account for all the yield up to 0.

Nuclear detecting systems at LNL and LNS: foreseen experiments to provide basic data for heavy-ion risk assessment.

The use of existing detecting systems developed for nuclear physics studies allows collecting data on particle and ion production cross-sections in reactions induced by Oxygen and Carbon beams, of interest for hadrontherapy and heavy-ion risk assessment. The MULTICS and GARFIELD apparatus, together with the foreseen experiments, are reviewed.

Strong enhancement of extremely energetic proton production in central heavy ion collisions at intermediate energy.

The energetic proton emission has been investigated as a function of the reaction centrality for the system (58)Ni + (58)Ni at 30A MeV. Extremely energetic protons (E(NN)(p) > or = 130 MeV) were measured and their multiplicity is found to increase almost quadratically with the number of participant nucleons, thus indicating the onset of a mechanism beyond one- and two-body dynamics.