AGATA

SPIRAL2 at GANIL in France and Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, FAIR, at GSI in Germany (both on ESFRI’s roadmap) will become world-leading facilities for experimental nuclear physics when they become operational around 2019 and 2022 respectively. They will be producing radioactive ion beams of very short-lived unstable nuclei with very high intensity.

Sweden is a part-owner of FAIR, which will cover most aspects of nuclei and their building blocks, and several nuclear structure physics teams in Sweden are taking part in the preparations. An important part of the engagement at FAIR is the European germanium detector project AGATA (Advanced Gamma Tracking Array), which will be the central detector system in the HISPEC experiment at FAIR.

Thanks to its modularity, it will also be possible to use AGATA at SPIRAL2, for example. AGATA detects the emitted gamma radiation from nuclear decomposition with high energy resolution, which enables the quantum structure of the nucleus to be measured and compared with theoretical models. The scatter pattern of the incidental gamma photons in the detector material can be tracked, and the photons can be characterised in relation to both energy and incidence angle in a way that was previously not possible, which opens the door to new opportunities.