A new recoil distance technique using low energy coulomb excitation in inverse kinematics

We report on the first experiment combining the Recoil Distance Doppler Shift technique and multistep Coulomb excitation in inverse kinematics at beam energies of 3-10 A MeV. The setup involves a standard plunger device equipped with a degrader foil instead of the normally used stopper foil. An array of particle detectors is positioned at forward angles to detect target-like recoil nuclei which are used as a trigger to discriminate against excitations in the degrader foil. The method has been successfully applied to measure lifetimes in (128)Xe and is suited to be a useful tool for experiments with radioactive ion beams. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.