Toward the drip lines and the superheavy island of stability with the Super Separator Spectrometer S³

Abstract

The Super Separator Spectrometer S ³ is a major experimental system developed for SPIRAL2. It has been designed for physics experiments with very low cross sections by taking full advantage of the very high intensity stable beams to be produced by LINAG, the superconducting linear accelerator at GANIL. These intensities will open new opportunities in several physics domains using fusion evaporation reactions, principally: super-heavy and very heavy element properties, spectroscopy at and beyond the dripline, and isomer and ground-state properties. The common feature of these experiments is the requirement to separate very rare events from intense backgrounds. S ³ accomplishes this with a large acceptance, a high background rejection efficiency, and a physical mass separation. This article will present the technical specifications and optical constraints needed to achieve these physical goals. The optical layout of the spectrometer will be presented, focusing on technical elements of the target system, the superconducting multipole magnets used to correct high-order optical aberrations, the electric and magnetic dipoles, and the open multipole triplet used for primary beam rejection. The expected system performance will be presented for three experimental cases using 3 specific optical modes of the spectrometer.