Doctoral Degrees (Physics)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/3640

Browse

Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Physics) by Author "Buthelezi, Edith Zinhle"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Near-target and other heavy residues in the interaction of ¹²C and ¹⁶O with ¹⁰³Rh
    (Stellenbosch : University of Stellenbosch, 2004-04) Buthelezi, Edith Zinhle; Cowley, A. A.; Steyn, G. F.; Van der Walt, T. N.; University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Science. Dept. of Physics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study forms part of a larger investigation which has as a primary objective the development of a comprehensive theoretical description of all the processes which contribute to the continuum in the interaction of 12C and 16O with nuclei. Previous investigations of 12C and 16O induced reactions on targets with mass close to A = 100 have shown that the experimental excitation functions and recoil range distributions of heavy residues can be reproduced satisfactorily by means of a theoretical model which takes relatively few dominant reaction mechanisms into account. These include the complete fusion of the projectile with the target, the incomplete fusion of break-up α-type fragments (i.e. single α particles, 8Be fragments and for the 16O induced reactions also 12C fragments) with the target and single-nucleon transfer at incident energies above about 15 MeV/nucleon. The mean-field interaction is mainly responsible for these interactions. The thermalization of the intermediate excited nuclei produced in this first stage of the reaction is described by an intranuclear interaction cascade, during which pre-equilibrium emission of particles and clusters may occur, followed by evaporation after statistical equilibrium has been attained. The model also included the probability that break-up α particles may escape with a large fraction of their initial energy after only a few interactions with individual target nucleons following their initial incomplete fusion. The theory also predicted an enhanced isobaric yield for residues with mass similar or near to that of the target. The subsequent analysis of the emission spectra of intermediate mass fragments in these reactions, however, indicated that two additional aspects need to be considered as well in order to reproduce the experimental data. The first is that the projectile may lose a substantial amount of energy in an initial-state interaction before breaking up, which can be described as a friction dissipative process. The second is that several other incomplete fusion channels of “non-α-cluster”- type fragments should also be included in a more complete description of these reactions as their contributions are not negligible. The present study has two main objectives. Firstly, to investigate the isobaric yield in the neartarget mass region by measuring production cross sections for 103Pd, 103mRh and 103Ru. Previous studies only provided data for 103Ag, which constitute only a few percent of the A = 103 isobaric yield. The new data constitute more than 80% of the A = 103 isobaric yield, which provide experimental confirmation of the enhanced isobaric yield in the near-target mass region. The second objective is to perform extensive new calculations of the excitation functions and recoil ranges in order to investigate the predictive power of the extended model in a priori calculations for the entire available data set.