Test of a 3He target to be used for transfer reactions in inverse kinematics and study of the nuclear structure of 74Se

In the last years, in the field of nuclear physics, great efforts have been made to produce and study nuclei far from the valley of stability. This has prompted the construction of facilities that produce Radioactive Ion Beams to push our knowledge to the limits of nuclear existence. One way to make use of these beams is via direct reactions (such as transfer reactions), which require new targets of light nuclei. These reactions need to be performed in inverse kinematics, as the heavier nuclei that are involved are unstable: they can be accelerated to form beams, but they do not live long enough to make targets out of them. Between these light nuclei, 3He is one of the most promising choices for the study of neutron-deficient nuclei, as it can be used in two-proton transfer reactions. For this purpose a solid, thin target of natW with 3He absorbed in the metallic lattice has been produced with an innovative technique (to be patented) in a collaboration between the Legnaro National Laboratories (LNL), Italy, and the CSIC-Materials Science Institute of Seville, Spain. The target has been tested at the LNL with a beam of stable 64Zn; the GALILEO γ-ray array, the Neutron-Wall neutron detector and the EUCLIDES light charged particle detector were employed to study the reaction. In this work, the target and its properties are described, and the complete analysis of the data collected during the test experiment is presented. This includes not only the results of the test itself, but also the study of the feasibility of neutron angular distributions measurement with the Neutron-Wall detector. Moreover, in fusion evaporation reactions with contaminants present in the target 74Se was produced abundantly: this allowed the study of its nuclear structure.